


Pathogenesis

by FleshDust



Category: The Strain (TV)
Genre: Angst, Biting, Blood, Corpses, Dark, Disease, F/M, Heavy Angst, Language, Mildly Dubious Consent, Oral Sex, Pain, Rough Sex, Sexual Content, Vampires, Violence, Violent Sex, Voyeurism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-23
Updated: 2016-11-20
Packaged: 2018-04-16 18:59:41
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 10
Words: 50,487
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4636578
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FleshDust/pseuds/FleshDust
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A human female is presented to the Ancients for feeding, but is rejected due to <i>strigoi</i>-infection. Vaun discovers that another mysterious disease courses through her blood, one that seems to be able to hold the blood worms back. She could be a valuable commodity in the fight against the plague of <i>strigoi</i>. He decides to examine and interrogate the female to find out what this malady is.  But things in life and death are rarely that simple.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> The tale that you’re about to read sprouted from the ideas of another writer. A brilliant Strain fic entitled Keys to the Heart, written by the lovely GoeticDisciple, inspired me to explore the world of the _strigoi_. Additionally, without revealing too much, the condition of her OFC got me thinking about co-infection in a human infected by _strigoi_. Meaning, it made me think of how a rival infection would act with the blood worms, and if the rival pathogen was strong enough, could stave off blood worms… at least for a while. And then I spat out this chapter.
> 
> I should mention that this fic features Vaun, whom I mistook for Quinlan in season one of the TV-show. We won’t go into that whole mess of disappointment, but Vaun actually fits nicely into the storyline that I have in mind for this fic. Vaun seems to be able to think for himself in the show, so in my usual canon-mangling manner, I've decided that he's a Born and thus, half-human. We want his bits intact, don't we. These events take place after the vampire plague has started, but before Gus joins Vaun's band of hunters.

Vaun sighed deeply as he ushered a piece of struggling, snarling cattle toward the makeshift atrium where the Ancients, for the most part, slumbered in a realm that was somewhere in between death and decaying reverie. Their corporate request, if it could be called that, had come swiftly and painfully as it torpedoed into his mind: _We wish to feed_. It was more of an implacable mandate, one that would never be disobeyed.

 _Business as usual, then_ , Vaun had thought and summoned a couple of _strigoi_ hunters to help him fetch the cattle from the large storage cage that served as a livestock pen. He was not without strength, but restraining the two or three pieces of cattle that the Ancients required for their sporadic gluttony was not possible. Not by himself. The cattle were prone to panic, squirming like slippery little pale eels when fetched.

It was the same this time, at least with the two creatures that the two _strigoi_ hunters at his side had grabbed. They reacted as one would expect, fighting and cursing and blubbering as the grim group proceeded down the dark hallway. Their human voices protested, begged, sobbed; bargained, but found no reply in their captors. Their pleadings became their own funeral dirge.

Vaun simply dumped the bovine that he had hauled in the middle of the circle of Ancients, weary from their mental assault. Strangely though, the one that he had hauled out of the cattle cage had not struggled much, nor had it voiced much protest. It had simply quaked in his searing grasp a few times as he pulled it along, but had otherwise allowed itself to be led to its demise.

He didn’t dwell on it further, however, turning instead on his heel to exit the dark atrium. If anything, he was grateful for the small respite from the usual struggling and begging. He did not need more sensations twisting around his nerves at the moment along with the hectoring of the old ones. Even their hunger echoed in his mind, heedless of the fact that he had fed well not two days past and would not truly require a feeding for at least another three. The greedy reverberation from their decrepit bodies made the distinctly _strigoi_ appendage inside of him vibrate.

He hadn’t even made it halfway back when an incensed cerebral bellowing came from the Ancients, so full of rage that it made his tired head feel like it would simply split in two.

_Vaun. Return. Remove this soiled creature from our midst._

He beckoned for his _strigoi_ cousins to continue without him; they had not heard the order. Apparently, this one was reserved for him alone, in all of its indignant glory. He was not quite sure what this was about, but he was not about to question commands. His hunters continued down the corridor with the soft, spontaneous chitters that was so characteristic of their kind.

As he approached the atrium again, he smelled the dynamic, rosy scent of blood. The desperate moans of the cattle reached his pointed ears, causing them to prick with instinctual interest. He could feel the ridges of them grow hotter. It made his stinger twine in his throat and he swallowed dryly against it, forcing the invasive proboscis deeper down into his gullet.

It was simply not wise to flail one’s stinger at the Ancients’ meal. While wise, the old ones had evolved, or perhaps devolved, into a state that mirrored the ruthless, indiscriminate manner of nature. They did not hesitate to attack if another predator not of their Ancient pack displayed feeding behavior near their prey. Vaun had seen it happen a handful of times, causing him to keep his stinger under strict control when in the presence of the old ones. The thing made a muffled gurgling noise as it settled and slid beneath his tongue, retreating testily.

Two pieces of cattle lay prone in the blushing darkness, painted with tempting splashes of red in the middle of the Ancients’ gloomy circle. The old creatures stood poised over them, jaws unhinged wide, reminiscent of snakes as they disengaged their own mandibles to, unbelieveably, swallow a bird’s egg whole. Antiqued but ever effective stingers were out, greedily attached to the throbbing carotid, femoral and ulnar veins of the humans. The human that Vaun had brought had backed to the far wall, pale and shivering, its eyes wide and full of consternation.

Uncertainly, he inquired what was amiss.

Their hiss of anger was fast and inexorable, stabbing into his brain with the claws of some feral thing.

 _That thing._ One of the Ancients indicated the human that had retreated to the back wall. _Remove it. It is unclean._

_Unclean?_

The Ancients gave a collective snarl of irritation, one that was vocal as well as mental.

_It is infected. Not fit for feeding._

Vaun needed no further explanation; many of his scars were from the stingers of the Ancients when they felt that he had not acted fast enough. Or when he had not displayed the respect that they were owed. He had learned that lesson well.

Without preamble, he loped around the circle of the Ancients toward the pale thing. His stinger squirmed pointedly at the carnage, as if trying to force him to approach the bleeding cattle instead. He ignored it and descended on the human. It retreated, but his patience was nearly depleted and he simply grabbed its white arm roughly and pulled it along. It stumbled and gasped behind him as he yanked it away, desperate to escape the oppressive cerebral scraping of the Ancients and the thick scent of blood.

Once in the corridor, the pulsing pressure beneath his tongue lessened, as did the pressure of the Ancients’ irritation. Pulling the cattle with him to the far end of the corridor, he slammed it against the wall to inspect it. It gave a soft moan of discomfort as its body hit the wall, but wisely enough, it remained still. Vaun slammed his palms into the wall on either side of its head, making it flinch slightly.

 _Infected?_ he thought to himself, careful to keep his thoughts on a wavelength that was his own. _It cannot be._

Every piece of cattle were examined upon capture in order avoid presenting the Ancients with a tainted meal. Granted, any ailment that traversed the blood of humans would not harm _strigoi_ in the least, but much like the human nobles of history, pampering had rendered the Ancients spoiled and selective.

Vaun himself had fed on humans beset by some disease or another in the past, and human ailments did have an effect on the taste of the blood meal. Some diseases gave it a cold, metallic taste, others rendered it milky sour or bitter. When a human was beleaguered with an internal growth of the malignant kind, the blood tasted sickly sweet with rot.

The Ancients, however, tolerated no afflicted blood of any kind, feeding only on healthy humans. Vaun endured their finicky nature for the cause. They were the old ones, after all, and their wisdom was unparalleled.

He leaned in close to the human thing, listening to the short snatches of its breath. Tiny, downy hairs stood on end on its arms. Its chest rose and fell underneath a thin, sleeveless undershirt, standard issue for cattle. There were shallow, rounded shapes on its chest, the twin points that crowned them pebbled against the light gray fabric. A glance at the flat vee of its groin, clothed in a pair of black male underthings, confirmed his suspicions. It was female.

Vaun had long since stopped differentiating between female and male scents when it came to humans. The scents of the two sexes were not identical, but both possessed an unmistakable foundation; a strong baseline of _human_. It was this scent that he, and other _strigoi_ , learned to search for when hunting. The gender of prey was of no importance when it came to feeding.

But as he continued to sniff the human for this alleged infection, his senses concentrated and he could easily discern its femaleness. It was a scent that he had nearly forgotten, it was a smell of piquant femininity, sunlight, and fleshy life-giving wombs. In comparison, he seemed to remember the scent variation of males as a smell of briny seed and wind and musk. It was a scent that he recalled on himself, the scent of the part of him that was human. But that had been a long time ago.

Then he detected the scent of _strigoi_ inside the female’s body. It was hidden in its blood, weak and straining underneath writhing layers of something that he could not identify. The female had indeed been infected by _strigoi_ , but from what he could tell, it had been infected quite some time ago. Yet there was no indication of impending metamorphosis. Its mane of hair was still intact, its blunt little nails still present.

Scowling with a confusion that he knew allowed the severely elongated corners of his mouth appear even longer, Vaun grabbed its thick dark hair. Tugging, he realized that indeed, none of it was shedding as of yet. Only a few strands of it tangled in his fingers when he pulled his hand away, which was normal, and he flicked them off with an impatient motion. Bringing his face close enough to feel its breath on his skin, he scrutinized its nose and ears closely. No signs of atrophy.

With a frustrated grunt, he wound his hands in its hair again, wrenching its head aside to gain close access to the pulsing vein at its neck. Its small hands flew up to his shoulders, clamping down and pushing weakly. A whine of protest escaped it, but he ignored it as he pressed his nose to the white column of its throat. The human’s small hands crept up to his temples then, but he was heedless of those, too. Annoyance about the mystery condition of the female kept his stinger secure, even though it rattled rapaciously.

Pulsing through its blood was something else, some other thing, fighting for dominance with the worms of the _strigoi_. He was able to detect that it was much smaller than the worms, but very potent. Closing his eyes, he tried to visualize the minute foreign things that swam in the human’s blood, but he could only discern that the scents of the unknown organism and the worms combined created a deceptive balance that could, to a younger and less experienced hunter, signal perfect health. It was truly a queer kind of mimicry, he decided.

Drawing back then, he scrutinized the human. Its hands fell away from his head and crossed in front of its chest. Its body shuddered again, and he noticed gooseflesh rising on its arms, legs; on the pallid curve of its wide hips where the sleeveless garment had pulled up and revealed the rounded flesh. His gaze dropped briefly, but returned momentarily to its face.

Some other pathogen had infected it, something that was at war with the essence of the _strigoi_.

He had never detected such a thing before. There was no telling what the outcome of such a microbial battle would be, but something told him that it held possibilities. The full realization dawned on him slowly as his black eyes regarded the female. Its eyes were large, the color of withered leaves that still clung to a fading tint of green. Its face was pale, round; its cheeks flushed with the panicked rush of the tainted blood beneath.

_Whatever the thing in her blood is, it’s been able to hold its own against the strigoi contagion. Thus far, at least._

Keeping his thoughts closely warded to any others, he pulled the female with him and down dark corridors lined with concrete. He would keep this human in the series of storage rooms where he dwelled between missions and find out what was in its blood. Such information was simply too valuable to ignore. He would interrogate the human about the ailment. Perhaps it knew what it was infected with.

In the distance, he heard one last, tormented wail from the dying cattle before everything was silent again.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is about the length of my usual chapters (4,900-5,000 words or so). The preceding chapter was more of a prologue than anything. Subsequent chapters will be around the same length as this one.
> 
> Thank you all for your support and kind comments. It is beyond appreciated.

The human female actually surprised him when they reached the storage rooms that he ostensibly called his quarters. As soon as its eyes fell on the pallet in the back of the room that they had entered, it wrenched itself out of his grasp with an angry, fatigued grimace and stumbled over to it. The female was asleep not a minute after it had dug itself into the pile of musty blankets, uttering not one word.

He listened to its even breaths as it slept, its exhalations tinted with a hint of the blood worms inside of its body. Layered with it was the scent of the other organisms, their identity cryptic and agitating. Vaun emitted a soft hiss at this queer microscopic mystery within the female’s body. Sitting down on a crate opposite of the human’s sleeping form, he loosened his tactical vest slightly and pulled back the hood that obscured the features that revealed him for what he was.

The human mumbled something unintelligible in its sleep, turning in its bundles of fabric. The pallet it had rather rudely claimed for itself had belonged to an allied human hunter.

The young human male had been an effective hunter, but in the end, he had fallen prey to the stinger of a _strigoi_. The human had sought out Vaun right away, asking to be ended before the infection claimed his body, his mind; before it claimed the very essence of who he was. That had been only a few weeks ago, and yet, the humanity and camaraderie he had felt had started to slip away as soon as the human died by his hand.

Vaun had obliged the human male’s request respectfully, of course, but not before thanking the human for his service. The young man had simply said that perhaps, if there was an afterlife, he would see the family he had lost to the _strigoi_ early on. His blue eyes had been accepting and serene, even when Vaun had aimed a shot at the base of his skull and watched as the light in them extinguished in the split second it took for the bullet to sever the human’s brain stem.

 _His name was Neil_ , he thought, warding his thoughts against any Ancient intruders, even though he knew them to be slumbering deeply.

Sometimes he forgot that the humans were not simply pieces in the game of survival and preservation. The less time he spent with humans, the more he could feel his own humanity fading away like so much smoke until the grim calmness of an organic machine overtook him. It was simpler, he often told himself. And it was. It was much simpler to reduce them to cattle when he needed to drag them to the Ancients for feeding, or to ambush one in a dark alley when his hunger became critical. But the truth of it was that Neil’s death had affected him more than he had wanted it to.

Neil had been a neophyte accountant when the plague began. While he had never grasped a real projectile weapon before in his life, he had readily started a spree of _strigoi_ slaughter after being forced to end the life of his infected family.

When Vaun had retrieved him on the Ancients’ behest, the wary human had explained that in his life before the plague, he had engaged in something that he named paintball. The game utilized weapons that fired paint capsules, a rather ridiculous notion as far as Vaun was concerned, but it had given Neil impeccable aim and timing when it came to the real thing, as it were.

Their dubious camaraderie had grown stronger during the short time that Neil had been apart of Vaun’s band. The human had cajoled him into card games which were, in fact, fairly amusing and a better use of his time than constantly thinking of the _strigoi_ that plagued not only the city and his own mind, but also the collective minds of the Ancients. Which in turn magnified his own thoughts into a torturous pounding that thrummed in his head and along his spine.

It had been easier when the human hunter was around to distract him. Neil had also had a quite vulgar sense of humor, and his ribald jokes had actually elicited a chuckle out of Vaun a handful of times.

But then, of course, a _strigoi_ had managed to slip its darting proboscis past Neil’s defenses, clamping it neatly into the meat of his calf. And then it had been over for him, only after a month of hunting. Not only had the young man been a valuable asset and a comrade, but his human vitality had made Vaun feel refreshed in a world that otherwise consisted of darkness, blood, and reducing the species that they claimed to protect to nothing more than livestock.

Vaun allowed his bunched shoulders to relax slightly as he leaned back, listening to the human’s breathing. If he concentrated, he could sense all the minute but crucial processes that its human body underwent to repair itself during sleep. He could not recall such frenetic activity inside of his own half-human body. Like a billion little insects, all of the miniscule cellular components rushed hither and yon, hustling, repairing, replacing; all while trying to mount defenses against the microbial invaders that they were faced with.

With a guilt that spoke to him with Neil’s voice, he decided that he wouldn’t keep disregarding the female’s humanity and think of her in terms of cattle.

After all, such was the reasoning of the Master and the upper _strigoi_ echelon, which in turn determined the behavior of the pawns. The general consensus was that humans were not much more than bovines to feed upon and recruit into the ranks, the reasoning being that the change simply made them better creatures. As if they were somehow flawed in their humanity, when in truth, they did not allow their fragile human condition to stipulate the terms of their survival. They made their own terms. They were clever and adaptable.

He felt rather disgusted with himself when he realized how quickly after Neil he had slipped back into thinking of humans as cattle. As if the Master’s invisible fingers had somehow crept into his brain like insidious little tendrils of dry rot, whispering to him of the monster that he was supposed to be. The monster whose kind was, in truth, much weaker and less prone to survive than the humans they fed upon.

 _Strigoi_ would never change; the Master would never change. _Strigoi_ never evolved. For millennia, they had all stayed the same—parasitic, virulent; hunters and vanquishers, lacking even the rudimentary emotional response of domestic animals. Fundamentally incapable of adapting. If that was not evolutionary weakness, Vaun did not know what was.

Spreading his legs slightly, he rested his elbows on his knees and allowed his shoulders to slump forward. Bowing his head then, Vaun allowed himself a rare moment of quiescence. The human’s soft breathing eventually allowed him to drift to a place of catatonia that passed for rest for those of his kind.

* * *

She had been so deprived of sleep that when the creature had pulled her out of the chamber of blood and screams, she thought that she had been hallucinating. But as she awoke, she realized that her current reality was not as simple as all that. She was fairly sure that hallucinations would be preferable as she cracked her eyes open and saw the creature where it sat, hunched over and motionless.

The sight was startling, and she could not help but to blanch slightly. Clenching her teeth, she smothered any noise that might have wanted to erupt from her throat. Screaming wouldn’t help anything at all, and she could only assume that whatever sadistic twist of fate had seen fit to spare her from the lanky creatures that had fed on her cellmates would not show the same benevolence twice if she started wailing like a fucking idiot. Any caterwauling on her part would probably be rewarded with dinner. And not _her_ dinner.

Sitting up carefully, she noted that the thick, miasmic feeling of illness and fatigue that had plagued her had abated, almost into nothing. Small favors, she decided, and studied her surroundings closer, as much as the dim lighting would allow. The walls were lined with concrete that still smelled faintly chalky with the crushed stone aggregate that had bonded them when they were poured. Light was provided by bare light bulbs that managed to cast feeble halos of amber glow upon the gray composite.

Before they were swallowed by shadows, she could glimpse gridded metal doors; the portcullises of modern industry. It made her think of the apartment she had lived in as a child, and how her parents had insisted on piling every piece of useless miscellany into their little storage room in the basement of the building. This place was similar, she assumed, some storage facility where these things had made their lair.

And in front of her, one of the things sat, its eyes closed and its body lacking any indication of the breath that would move it had it been alive. Its very existence defied natural laws.

For all of her rigorously scientific education, the things she had seen and realized in the last few days defied those laws of nature that she had once held absolute. It had started with her unbelievably shitty luck on her recent trip to Zimbabwe. In a really ironic, Murphy’s Law type of way, she had been infected with the very organism that she was there to study.

_Oh yes, work study in Zimbabwe will look fucking fantastic on paper._

And then arriving back in the dorm in Manhattan, only to find the city overrun with things that disregarded all biological mandates that she could recall. She could not, for the life of her, place them in any other category but cryptozoology.

At first, she had refused the term that she had heard people bellow in the streets of Manhattan, the term that her own brain automatically wanted to agree with.

What the fuck else could they be called but vampires? Blood-suckers, exsanguinators, but no charming, Gothic gentlemen speaking lines of dark poetry, nor any blond Viking-like contemporaries suckling the necks of willing maidens.

What was one to do with packs of frenzied, pseudoscientific, dead-but-not fucking plasma fiends that wagged their mouth-tentacles around the streets of the city?

_Cryptozoology. Vampires._

_Dawkins wept._

The world had gone down the fucking rabbit hole. And the hole was full of goddamn dead Mad Hatters with tentacle-stingers. Oh, March Hare, prepare yourself for one hell of a tea party.

 _A very merry unbirthday to you!_ the characters from Alice in Wonderland chimed in her head, obscenely appropriate in a world that was well on its way into pandemic collapse.

_Unbirthday, indeed._

The icing on the morbidly funny cake was that now one of the creatures had her in its thrall. She assumed that it was going to use her as its own personal vending machine. Or perhaps this one had a larger appetite and would just suck her into a dry husk as soon as it woke up. She had seen it happen before she was taken and brought to this place. Men and women and children, being suckled at until their lips turned violet and their skin started to look blue-white and translucent like arctic ice as they were drained.

By sheer dumb luck, she had managed to avoid to become a meal for one of them, but her arm had been grazed by the stinger of a particularly tenacious creature that tried to get into her dorm room. She glimpsed its blue overalls and recognized it as one of the janitors, and in turn it had recognized her as something that was apparently _à la carte._

She had managed to slam the door on it, but not before the dead shit slipped its stinger into the crack of the door one final time, delivering a minute scrape to her forearm; a final insult to her humanity. She had bolted down the fire escape instead, and later found out what such a scratch really meant. But she had yet to see any signs of the metamorphosis.

And then, she had been kidnapped by a bunch of them, stuffed into the back of a large, black car, and brought to… wherever this place was. There had been others in the storage cage with her, all of them suffering from shock and utter denial of their precarious situation. They bubbled incoherent hysteria, scratched like animals at the metal latticework that enclosed them and scampered as far from the gate as they could when the beings came for them.

She hadn’t tried to talk to them, mostly because she hadn’t been able. She hadn’t spent even one hour as a prisoner when she had started to feel the initial chills and burns of fever, and within the next hour, she had been a nearly delirious wreck. When the creature that now rested in front of her came to retrieve her, she had been almost completely listless with the fever, the pain; the horrible, violated feeling of insidious little organisms writhing through the filigree of her circulatory system.

She wasn’t sure if she should feel relieved or not that she had survived the blitzkrieg of illness that had assailed her. Especially when she noticed that the creature was now staring at her from where it sat. It had only raised it head slightly, the rest of its limbs were in the same position, giving it an appearance of a dark, hunching predator. It was strangely dressed in black paramilitary-style clothing which contrasted starkly against the marble-like pallor of its marred skin.

 _The goddamn vamp gendarmerie,_ she thought.

Its head was devoid of any hint of hair, which also drew her morbid interest to its ears. Somehow, it did not surprise her when she found them pointed and longer than human ears. Suspecting that very little would ever surprise her again, she glanced at its high, sharp cheekbones and its alabaster lips that stretched into an impassive Glasgow smile across the lower half of its face.

Perhaps most unsettling of all, she found intelligence and subjective sentience in its gaze. Its eyes were black and scarlet marbles, and looked like they were not supposed to hold things of such substance.

She flinched very slightly when the creature shifted and rose, announcing its movements with a rustle of heavy fabrics and the clink of buckles.

She hoped that she would give it indigestion with all the shit swimming around in her veins.

* * *

The human female surprised him again by speaking as soon as he rose. He hadn’t expected that, even though he had been aware of her little visual examination longer than she knew. He thought that she would be reduced to a screaming pile of meat as soon as she noticed his gaze on her.

Even after an unnaturally long un-life, Vaun could still be taken unawares.

“So,” she said, sounding weary, “When are you doing it?”

It took him a few moments to reply. When he opened his mouth to speak, only a dry rattle emerged and he realized that he had actually not utilized his vocal cords in some time. He tried again, and was more successful.

“What?”

“You _do_ speak,” she said before craning her neck and motioning impatiently at it. “Lunchtime. When are you going to drain me?”

Bewildered, he tilted his head at the human. His meddlesome stinger made a deep gurgling noise in his chest. It seemed to have no qualms over the fact that the female was infected and thus could not serve as sustenance. The female’s gray-green eyes narrowed with apprehension.

Giving a clicking trill that he hoped sounded peaceful enough, he crouched in front of her where she sat on the pallet, still bunched in blankets that smelled of mildew and human skin. To her credit, she did not flinch, but her eyes remained suspicious.

“I have no plans to drink you,” he replied, his voice low and discordant. “Even if I wanted to, I cannot. You are infected.”

The human’s stony countenance flickered a bit at that. Her shoulders sagged slightly and she looked down at her hands where they lay bundled in a mess of fabric. Her eyelids were a sickly lavender color.

“Yeah,” she said then, her voice hollow. “I know. I assume this is the reason that I’m not dead?”

“Yes.”

“So then… why?” she countered, fixing him defiantly with a gaze that held all the false bravado of a creature with nothing to lose. “Why did you bring me here? Seems to me that euthanasia would be appropriate under the circumstances.”

Vaun paused a little at that. He sensed that under her bold demeanor a frightened human shuddered, acutely aware of its own mortality in spite of all the logic that bespoke against the situation at hand. He realized that she knew very well what would happen should the worms be allowed to run their course. The human hunter, Neil, had reacted the same, carefully hoarding his fear and coming to terms with it all by sobbing quietly the night before he had approached Vaun for release.

The complexity of humans never ceased to surprise him. It made the part of him that shared their human condition feel singular and strangely alive.

“You are, ah… infected with something else besides _strigoi,_ ” he growled, his voice crackling like crumpled paper. “It seems that it able to counter the change. At least for now.”

“ _Strigoi_ ,” she parroted. “Haven’t heard that term for them before. And yeah, I am infected with something else. Seemed a bit weird that I was still running around four days after infection. Figured it has to have something to do with the other thing.”

“Do you know what the other organism is?” Vaun asked her.

She replied with a strange glance.

“I should. I study it. Or I used to… _fuck._ ” her voice wavered, and he saw the fearful, delicate thing for a moment again before she composed herself. “ _Plasmodium falciparum._ ”

“What is that?” For all of his years upon the Earth, he had never really studied the maladies of humankind. After all, there was usually only one that concerned him.

“Malaria.”

He did not know the disease, but recognized the name due to the several smatterings of human languages that he had acquired over the centuries.

“Malaria… _Mala aria_. Italian. Bad air?”

Incredibly, a small smile tugged at the corners of her mouth. The human part of him stirred, as if awakening from a deep slumber and remembering its own existence.

“Color me impressed,” she quipped with a type of grim amusement. “It’s a protozoan parasite transmitted by _Anopheles_ mosquitoes… forget it, it’s not important. I was infected overseas. I ran thick and thin blood smears on my blood when I came home. I noticed paroxysmal chills and subsequent fever in thirty-hour intervals…”

The human sounded like she was rattling off a oft-read, well-rehearsed list until she apparently noticed what she was doing.

“Sorry about that. Old habits die hard, you know? Yammering about protozoans always calmed me.”

The tension in her body had indeed dissipated slightly, he noticed. Her shoulders had lowered and some color had returned to her cheeks even though they remained rather pale. She had even swept a few errant strands of hair behind her ear. It was a dark chestnut color, its scent heavy with the oils of an unwashed human body. The length of it brushed just below her shoulders.

He noticed dark spotted patterns on her pale skin there, traversing the tops of her shoulders and her upper arms. A sharp intake of breath distracted him from his observation, and he regretted his inspection immediately when he sensed the infected blood surge in her veins.

A miniscule blush of anxiety crept into her cheeks to redden them further, and he scented fear leaking out of her pores as the tension in her body returned. The distinct alkaline smell of distress caught the attention of his _strigoi_ appendage, and he cursed it internally when it emitted an obscene churring sound that rumbled behind his teeth.

“There is no need to be afraid,” he assured her. “I will not harm you.”

* * *

She studied the crouching creature in front of her for a few moments. It had been quickly apparent that her initial deductions were correct: this was not some mindless, dead-eyed thing like the beings crawling the streets of the city like so many dirty cockroaches. The creature was decidedly male with a strange, dual voice that reminded her a fellow student named Hank whom she had roomed with when she was an undergrad.

Besides smoking purple kush until she got a contact high and decimating the contents of their fridge on a regular basis (even the mustard), Hank had been very fond of Tuvan throat singing. Her years of undergraduate work were punctuated by the outlandish vocalizations, but that was not to say that they didn’t have a profound, ethereal beauty.

A strange layer of such sounds reverberated underneath the primary voice of the creature in front of her.

She held his gaze for a few moments and shrugged.

“Well, I suppose that if you wanted to hurt me, you would've done so already,” she mumbled.

He nodded and rose, walking over to the far wall where a handful of tall metal cabinets stood side-by-side. Opening one, he surveyed its contents before collecting a couple of bundles of fabric. The slender appearance of his body, even when bulked by the black tactical gear, gave lie to the strength that she had felt in his grasp earlier, even through the fog of fever that had assailed her.

“Clean clothing,” he stated simply. “Those cabinets contain more of the same, along with other items that humans use. There’s non-perishable food, as well.”

He handed her the bundle and she examined it. They were men’s clothes, a nondescript black t-shirt that was now dark gray and soft due to excessive wear; its front adorned with a faded yellow print that had long since become illegible. A pair of olive green cargo trousers and a pair of white socks that revealed they were not a matching pair due to a red stripe on the cuff of one, and two green stripes on the cuff of the other.

It made her wonder if there were other humans here besides her. Other _live_ ones, anyway. A caustic feeling of anger simmered inside of her at the treatment of the people who had been captured with her. They had been presented as meals to the creatures in the room of blood and screams.

Granted, she had been delirious with fever and thankfully, could not remember the details of the viscera. But she had seen red splashes and heard the terrified sounds of her fellow humans, accompanied by the voracious howls of the creatures. In her confusion and terror, she had felt a hot stream of urine trickle down her leg. She had felt the slick sensation of warm blood underneath her feet. The soles of her feet were probably still crusted with it.

 _No,_ she decided, _I cannot deal with that right now. I can’t. Not now._

Just the thought of her fellow captives and their fate made her so very tired. So very fragile, and so very human. She could not face it right now, in this dark place where she was, probably on the cusp of another _Plasmodium_ cycle, one that may or may not be her last, if the other infection didn’t turn her into one of _them_ first. Her body was filthy and vulnerable and running on empty; the mind that she had worked to harden to disease and death over the years was screaming about her precarious mortality; about how fucking lonely she was here, at the very home stretch of her life.

She simply could not deal with the deaths of others when she knew that her own loomed in the room with her, and not in the creature that had brought her here. It lurked in her very veins, a terrible chimera with two heads, one of a horrifying living death, the other of a true death and a trip into a beyond that she was not sure that she even believed in.

“Thanks,” she whispered. “Listen, I really need a shower. Is there one?”

The creature nodded, vaguely indicating a direction to their right with a white hand that lacked fingernails.

“This place has been equipped with basic amenities for human allies,” he said. “There should be sanitary items in the shower room left by… the one before you. Follow me.”

 _Before me?_ she wondered to herself, but did not voice the question out loud. She didn’t want to know.

She followed the slender creature through darkened corridors of concrete in which light was lacking, making her focus solely on the pale rounded shape of his head as she padded after him on bare, dirty feet.

They reached a shower room then, and the creature flicked a switch that she hadn’t seen due to the darkness. A lone light bulb crackled to life. The room was adorned with floor-to-ceiling tiles and four shower heads, their metal necks sticking out of the walls like anorexic chrome arms. A central drain gaped darkly in the middle of the slightly sloping floor.

The stained tile had a shade reminiscent of yellowed teeth and the sheer feel of the room made her think of junior high gym class and communal showers, squeals and gossip and stealing a glance at the girl showering next to you to see if her boobs had grown bigger than yours. There was a musty smell of mildew in the air.

Her eyes fell on a pile of bottled soaps and shampoos in a corner, their garish neon colors a stark contrast against the sepia of the room. Just the sight of such a small thing made her feel perversely grateful. She turned to the creature.

“Thank you,” she said.

“Vaun,” came a rattling whisper from his throat.

He had already turned, walking out of the room and into the shadows of the corridor when she called out to him. He stopped, but did not turn back.

“I’m sorry?”

“My name is Vaun,” he told her without turning around.

“Oh. I’m Natalie. Nat.”

“I will wait at the end of the corridor. Call out when you’re done, and I will come.”

And then he vanished from the area of light in the shower room, melting into the shadows of the corridor. His departure was exceptionally quiet, despite the heavy, black boots that she had noticed on his feet.

Nat proceeded to immediately strip off her filthy, blood-spattered and sweat-soaked clothing. The men’s boxers that she had been outfitted with were still moist and reeking of stale urine. She kicked the soiled bundle into a corner with a disgusted grunt and slammed one of the shower buttons, not caring that the water was on just this side of cold when it hit her.

Showering had never felt so good, she decided. She imagined that she could feel the stench of disease and death slough off her body like gray layers of dead skin.

* * *

Predictably, Vaun remained in the shadows beyond the light of the shower room, watching the human, Natalie, as she went about cleaning herself. Initially, he told himself that he had no interest in her except the notion of examining something that he hadn’t seen in a long time.

He watched her cast off her soiled clothes, baring expanses of pale skin and rounded female shapes. The patterning that he had noticed on her skin before extended beyond her shoulders, traversing her shoulder blades like little spatters of shadow. Soon, he realized that they were scars, but could not guess at their cause.

He found himself distracted from his clinical curiosity by a strange clenching sensation in his midsection. It was a coiling, heated feeling that prompted memories that had almost been completely lost to him. He wasn’t altogether sure that he welcomed them back as he watched her.

When her hands drifted to wash her chest and belly, he forced himself to suppress a near-imperceptible purr that emanated from both his larynx and the stinger that lined it. His response unsettled him enough that he retreated quickly to the end of the corridor, leaning his back against the wall.

For once, he called for his stinger to emerge from his throat, biting down on it when it did so. He welcomed the sharp twinge of pain and ignored the squeal of the appendage. The furious sound told him that his subconscious did not approve of this willful treatment of the organ that provided him with sustenance.

Vaun closed his eyes and bit down again, hard enough to feel his mouth fill with his own alabaster blood.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **On Darkfics:** I had someone contact me through another site, asking if this story will be as dark and violent as my other stories. So, if you have read other stories of mine and worry that I may apply the same formula here, the answer is no. This will not be as dark as that, but at the same time, do not expect flowery romance and stuff. But I promise, none of the horrid, sadistic things that I usually write about will show up here. =D
> 
>  **On _Plasmodium falciparum_ :** I “gave” Natalie this disease because much like her, I study parasitic organisms. Naturally, they are what I am most comfortable writing about, even though my field of study concentrates more on the amoebic parasites that cause human disease rather than _Plasmodium_. I just thought that its cyclic nature would be appropriate for the storyline that I have in mind. In any case, in this scenario, _P. falciparum_ will not behave strictly as it would in the real world since, well… you know, fiction, hehe. Additionally, there are no infections in the real world that “fight” each other out in this manner, this is pure fabrication on my part. Technically, there are a couple of diseases that can cancel out an effect of the other, but they are rare and I am not terribly familiar with them.
> 
> Should you want to know more about _P. falciparum_ and other _Plasmodium_ species, I can recommend the CDC’s entry on Malaria (lol, CDC; Eph). Just Google “CDC Malaria”.
> 
>  **On Natalie:** Yes, I know, this is the name of the actress who plays Kelly Goodweather (Natalie Brown) in the TV series. Please note that the character of Nat in this story has no basis in the character of Kelly or her actress, Nat just shares her name with the name of the actress. I was thinking of names (Nat’s name was one of the last things I added to this chapter; I did not know it yet when I started to write), and I liked the name Natalie. Tried to think of others, but I am just too stubborn for my own good.
> 
>  **On Language:** Please note that English is my third language. Usually, I do not mention this to readers, but while rereading and rewriting some of my older fics this summer, I noticed strange sentences and such. When I read them, I realize that I’ve applied English words to the sentence structure of another language. So if you spot something that sounds weird, do let me know. Well, this goes for anything in my fics. I love criticism of any kind, so feel free.


	3. Chapter 3

After she had showered and dressed, the being named Vaun returned to lead her back to the storage rooms where she had slept. He waited for a few minutes as she finished washing the soiled men’s underclothes that she had been wearing.

Lacking detergent, shampoo was just as likely to do the same job. If nothing else, it gave her something to focus on for a short time, something mundane and tedious that reminded her of a life that she knew was no more. She hung the items on one of the protruding shower heads to dry.

The clothes that Vaun had given her were indeed clean, even though they held the slightly musty smell of storage. While not made for a female body and not flattering in the least (like it even really mattered), they fit reasonably well and felt heavenly after wearing sweat-stained underthings that smelled of piss and disease and death.

An exponential onslaught of questions spun through her mind during the short walk back to the storage rooms. Each time one query nattered through her mind, three more spawned from it, demanding attention. Her senses, previously suppressed by fever, dread and the muddy chaos of confusion, were returning and it made her feel almost like herself.

Almost.

The white shape of the creature’s head glided in front of her, silently showing the way through the blackness. She could hear muted purrs and growls emanating from him from time to time, seemingly by their own volition. The animal-like sounds trailed him like smoke.

Her stomach emitted resounding rumbles of hunger when they stepped back into the rooms. Her attention immediately went to the storage cabinets from which Vaun had procured the clothes. Wordlessly, he motioned for her to go ahead. When she turned back from the cabinet, canned dinner in hand, he was nowhere to be seen.

She wasn’t truly surprised by his sudden departure, nor the eerily wraith-like manner of it. Her interest in anything but for the food in her hands faded temporarily as her stomach clenched hollowly. She tore the lids of the cans, nicking a couple of fingers but not caring, digging her fingers into Spam and canned pears and cold ravioli with the gluttonous fervor of a starving thing.

The pears were sweet and grainy, with a metallic tang. The Spam was briny with globules of amber gelatin. The pasta of the ravioli was mushy and the filling gray and questionable. And they were all the most delicious things she could remember eating.

Once she had sated her hunger, her mind started to function somewhat normally again. Assessing her situation, she attempted to discern the best way to approach… whatever this was.

 _Clusterfuck, that’s what,_ her brain declared stupidly. It was so ridiculous and horribly apt that she nearly laughed out loud.

Otherwise she might have wept.

She was alive, ironically, because of two things that were currently in the process of killing her. The creature who called himself Vaun had said that the infections were somehow countering each other, which was an utterly preposterous notion.

Or rather, it _would_ have been completely preposterous… a few weeks ago.

From what she could gather, metamorphosis into one of the things happened within a day, more or less. It had been considerably longer than that, not to mention the fact that the regular cycles of chills, fever, and sweats that _Plasmodium_ was notorious for seemed completely off.

 _Plasmodium_ species differed in their fever cycles, with _Plasmodium falciparum_ manifesting fever cycles every thirty to forty-five hours, in between which the patient would feel normal. Until the next cycle started, in any case.

She could not be certain, but she was fairly confident that she was past the starting point of the next cycle. Which in turn meant that something was hampering the _Plasmodium_ , and vice versa, since she showed no signs of the _strigoi_ change.

She thought of this duet of parasites, paddling around in her veins and squabbling like stray dogs over meat scraps.

It made her miss her microscope, the wonderful instrument that allowed glances into the tiny universes that were hidden from the naked eye. Cheap piece of junk as far as compound microscopes went, but it was hers all the same. Two-hundred something dollars on Amazon, in comparison to the five-thousand dollar machines that the university sported.

Her pristine microscope slides, clean and sparkling, sterilized with an immersion in twenty percent chlorine bleach solution after each use. The old off-brand shoe box in which she kept a collection of permanent slides that were, to her, what photographs of fond moments would be to most others. She visualized the slides, complete with neatly printed labels for macroscopic specimen identification at a glance.

_Cryptosporidium. Acanthamoeba. Leishmania. Trypanosoma. Giardia. Naegleri. Plasmodium._

_”Plasmodium,”_ she chuckled out loud, mirthlessly.

She looked at her forearm where the janitor thing’s stinger had scratched her. Only a faintly purple little line remained on the pale skin there. Such a small thing to spell the end of a human’s life, she mused, but she knew better than to think that deadliness had anything at all to do with size.

She scratched at the small scrape absently, considering her current options.

Natalie recognized that her first human instinct was to escape. She mulled it over for a while, but the more she thought of it, the less sense its logistics made. She did not know where she was, or what it was like outside. She did not have her wallet, keys, or phone. The streets could be overrun with those things by now. And what if she did escape, and fell into paroxysmal fevers in the middle of… wherever? Would there be anyone around to help her? She was just as likely to die in some gutter, face down in dirty snow runoff.

Still, the stubborn thought lingered with her for a while. But when she eyed the compact darkness beyond the light of the storage rooms, she remembered. Memories of blood and hungry roars and flesh being torn asunder crippled any courage she might have felt.

It was supremely easy for her conscious mind to insist that she at least try to escape, no matter the ill logistics of such a plan. Her subconscious, however, could play far dirtier than its conscious counterpart, and after a few more glances at the blackness beyond the rooms, she abandoned the idea.

And she had never even been afraid of the dark, not even as a child. But in the darkness, pale, lanky shadows gorged on blood and cries were reduced to dying gurgles.

In the darkness, there were monsters.

She arose from where she had been sitting cross-legged on the pallet, causing the empty cans in her lap to clatter to the floor.

Picking at the tangles in her still-moist hair, she started to pace about the space, her mind churning. Amidst her thoughts of parasites and canned pears and bleach, Vaun returned. His compulsory vocalizations yanked her out of her abstractions.

* * *

Vaun approached her, stopping a few feet away. He could see the muscles of her jaw working, clenching and unclenching hard to suppress the fear that he could smell on her. She did look somewhat better, at least.

While her complexion remained rather pale, it had regained some of the pinkish hue that was the norm for her kind. Her eyes which had been glazed over with exhaustion and illness were sharp now, and fixed on him. She smelled of cleansing agents and human foods and female flesh. Once he had allowed himself to become aware of the latter, he could not ignore it.

Memories of similar scents flashed by him briefly, but he pushed them away. Their source was too complex, and the scarce few times he had explored such a thing, it had ended very badly.

A few moments flitted by before she spoke.

“Listen… Vaun,” she said, bringing her hands up to her face to rub her temples.

“I get it, all right? The infections I have are somehow countering each other. Interesting, yes. But why keep me here? Just so that you and your buddies can count the minutes until I kick the bucket?”

Vaun winched very slightly at her little speech, mostly because it was not wholly incorrect.

He had just returned from a consultation with the Ancients who had not been particularly pleased at being woken up from their repose. But they had remained queerly silent for quite some time after Vaun had explained the female’s condition to them, and he had almost thought they had drifted back into the realm in which they slumbered and dreamt of days gone by.

The hunters at his sides, two well-trained _strigoi_ that were kept on a tight cerebral leash by the Old Ones, had started to grow restless as they smelled the human on him. When they started hissing hungrily and snapping at Vaun as well as each other, the Ancients gave a vicious mental roar that had caused the two hunters to squeal in distress. They clawed at their skulls and their stingers writhed in their chests violently enough for the eye to discern ribs bending outwards.

They were growing hungry. He was, too.

The Ancients had commanded the two hunters to leave, and they did so, chastised and thoroughly bedraggled. Once alone with their half-breed agent, they had turned their thoughts to him. At first, their shared voice had been abrasive and dry like old, cracked fingers brushing across his consciousness.

 _You should have destroyed the human,_ they admonished, allowing him little time to reply. _However, she may yet be of use to us, so perhaps it is a good thing that you did not._

Their minds were heavy with hibernation, yet their thoughts were never truly dulled. It made him wonder what they dreamed of, for sometimes it seemed that they did not think of anything but feeding and the seemingly never-ending pestilence of _strigoi_. Perhaps the rogue Master and the eradication of their own kind was what they dreamed of. It was an old obsession that seemed to haunt them even in their inertia.

Sometimes Vaun feared that he would be similarly decrepit one day, slumbering and dreaming of illness and death and enemies with no pleasant memories to sustain him. He knew that it was impossible, of course, since the Ancients were unique. They had been spawned as they were by means unknown to all except for a select few; means that would stay arcane until the end of time.

Vaun was both blessed and cursed with human blood, which, he hoped, would make his lifespan finite.

 _The human can resist the scourge of the worms, can she not?_ the Ancients inquired then.

 _Not exactly, Old Ones,_ he replied. _The other parasite is able to simply counter the worms. At least at present. There is no true indication of the outcome of such a… conflict. However, I can sense her body slowly growing weaker. The conflict is damaging her._

They remained silent for a while, closing him out of their deliberations.

_She shall stay here. She must be observed._

_Observed? Here? Is that… the best course of action?_

He knew that he was questioning their wisdom, but the Old Ones seemed not to notice in their hurry to get their meaning across. He could tell that they were impatient to return to the slumber of their dormant microcosm.

 _We must bear witness to the outcome of this pestilential conflict,_ they had declared with an archaic authority that brooked no arguments. _We do not need to tell you that time grows short if her health is already suffering. We must watch her while we can._

When Vaun nodded and turned to leave, they had already receded into the black sleep that allowed them to dwell on the secret sufferings of a long un-life.

* * *

The creature named Vaun watched her with his bicolored eyes as she spoke. She could feel the anger swelling in her chest. It was a basic human incredulity at being held captive.

“Natalie,” he said, the peculiar, deep subvocals of his voice thick with something that sounded like weariness. “You will stay here. I have been instructed to observe you during the course of your… illness.”

She opened her mouth, allowing an incensed hiss to emerge, but he continued speaking before she could launch the string of expletives that had been bubbling in her throat ever since he started to speak.

“Please understand,” he growled, “We are fighting against the _strigoi_. Your… condition might help. If there is an organism that can weaken the worms of the _strigoi_ , we must examine it. Wouldn’t you research anything that may help in the battle against the harmful parasites that you study?”

She turned away from him, her fists clenched hard enough for her short and oft-bitten nails to dig into her palms. Her anger transformed into the stubborn indignation of someone who knew that they were being told the truth but refused to accept it.

He was completely right. No matter how foul the truth, he was fucking right. Staring into the steel door of the storage cabinet, she heard his spontaneous trills for a moment before he continued.

“I don’t want to keep you prisoner,” he murmured, “But it is not my decision. This is _war_ , Natalie. We are asking you for your help to possibly preserve your own kind. Your entire _species_.”

“Possibly,” she whispered. “There’s no guarantee that this will do… _anything_ to help people. You’ll just be watching me as I die.”

Grasping for a faraway straw, she added that she could go to a university hospital; they’d probably be able to observe her to see the progression of her co-infection, she told him.

“No. You’ve no idea how much things above have deteriorated, after only a very short time. Please realize that the streets are beleaguered with _strigoi_ now. Hospitals overflow with the sick and dying.”

She heard the rustle of his black, synthetic fabrics as he moved closer to her. There was a sound of inhalation and a slight shifting of the tangled strands of her hair as he released the sampled breath that he had taken of her. His exhalation flowed hotly around the shell of her ear and prickled at the back of her neck.

“Your scent is deceiving. To most _strigoi_ you smell uninfected. The scent of the worms is… obscured, somehow. The first _strigoi_ that saw you would try to drink you. Granted, it would stop as soon as it tasted the worms, but not before tearing your throat open.”

Wincing, she turned her head so that she could cast him a sidelong glance.

“There are antiparasitic drugs that treat malaria. I’d be cured, and this would go away,” she told him, cringing inwardly at how spiteful and utterly childish she sounded.

“And should you take them, the malaria would be cured, allowing the worms of the _strigoi_ free reign,” he responded quietly.

“ _Goddamn_ it,” she spat crudely, unable to think of anything better to say.

His hand was suddenly on her shoulder, heavy and unnaturally warm. Long, pale fingers curled softly around its balled shape. It made her flinch slightly, but she did not recoil nor slap his hand away.

“Natalie,” he murmured with a breath that smelled of heat and loam and a deep, primal base note that she could not identify.

“You’re dying. I don’t know how long it will be, but you will not survive. You _know_ this. Take the drugs, and you will survive the malaria. But you _will_ succumb to _strigoi_. Don’t take them, and you will probably remain alive… for some time.”

His hand left her shoulder then, leaving an invisible handprint of heat that felt strangely comforting in her current circumstances. She shivered as the warm signature dissipated.

“I can sense the damage that’s occurred to your system already due to this conflict. Even if the malaria could eradicate the _strigoi_ , your body would be too weak for the drugs to cure the malaria afterward.”

Natalie could vaguely discern his strange, forlorn features in the reflection cast by the steel cabinet door in front of her. She pressed her forehead into the cold, indifferent metal, increasing the chill in her body that the absence of his touch had left her with.

“We may not know much of human disease,” Vaun continued evenly, “But our agents have tried all available antiparasitics on _strigoi_ -infected humans since we learned of the existence of such drugs some decades ago.”

Her breath made little clouds of fog in the metal door. Her head hurt. Her stomach hurt. Her eyes hurt. _Everything_ hurt when he spoke the truth that she knew to be correct, but refused to accept in a fundamentally human type of stupid, desperate adamancy. She scolded herself for it. She had seen this same, desperate wish for _deus ex machina_ in those dying of an incurable parasitic infection.

She remembered the mother of a young boy who had contracted _Naegleria fowleri_ , a pathogenic amoebic organism with a ninety-five percent fatality rate. The infection inevitably lead to primary amoebic meningoencephalitis.

The organism was, in essence, necrotizing the young boy’s brain until he died, screaming in horror at the hallucinations brought forth by savaged and warped brain tissue. His desperate parents prayed all the while, directing their sobbing litanies to a god who allegedly created all, even the amoebas that reduced the brains of children into dead, rotten sludge.

She remembered the mother pleading with her for her boy’s life, as if she was some miracle worker and not just a graduate student who was there to simply identify the organism.

 _Please,_ the woman had cried, hugging her and weeping into her shoulder. _Please save my son. There must be something! Oh God! Please God, this can’t be happening, can’t be happening, can’t…._

That was exactly how she felt right now.

_This can’t be happening._

And with it that thought came the fundamental feeling of being completely alone here, at the end.

 _Her_ end.

And it was so fucking pitiful that it made her angry.

Behind her, Vaun sighed with breath that she suspected was wholly unnecessary for him.

“None of the antiparasitic drugs were effective against the scourge. But we know how toxic they are. You will not survive treatment in such a state.”

“Leave me alone,” she said, her voice trembling in a way that she absolutely hated.

He stilled behind her for a few moments, but to her relief, she soon heard his quiet footsteps departing into the darkness of the corridors outside. After a few minutes, everything was silent again.

Natalie sank down to the floor and vomited.

* * *

She slept. For hours, she did not know how many, she slept. After she had finished expelling the half-digested contents of her stomach, she had discovered a tiny bathroom in a hallway that connected to the adjoining room. The walls of the hallway, if it even could be called that, were only long enough to fit a narrow door one one wall that opened up to the desperately outdated but clean bathroom.

It had been some time since it was last used if judging by the way the pipes grunted when she turned the faucet on. Rusty water sputtered into her hands for a few seconds, but quickly grew clear again. The toilet gurgled when she test-flushed it, but sounded normal at the second flush.

She bundled up some tissue that she had found and used the wet paper to mop up her sick. And morbidly enough, she was hungry again from expelling the food that her body hadn’t had time to metabolize.

After she had cleaned up the stinking puddle, she relieved herself and washed her face, hands and forearms in the sink as well as she could. A can of gelatinous Spaghetti-O’s that drifted in a thick, rust-colored mock-tomato sauce replaced the food that she had thrown up.

And then she slept, dreaming of hollow nothingness and being extremely grateful about it. Waking up an untold time later, she discovered that she was still alone. She ate a can of peaches in a syrup so cloyingly sweet that it made her teeth hurt.

Lacking anything else to do, she started to go through all of the storage cabinets present in the room. She found more men’s clothes there, men’s toiletries and assorted electronics that had exhausted their batteries, but what made her pause was a pile of magazines and newspapers. It was rather pathetic, really, how happy the find made her.

Digging through the pile, she found a few National Geographics and Times, and a number of issues of Playboy. Finding them made her chuckle slightly, the laugh a strange mix of amusement and sorrow at the stereotype that this person’s possessions had reduced them to. In the back of her mind, some tiny voice wondered what category she would be lumped into some time hence, when she was dead.

She abandoned the thought immediately. Vaun had brought her face-to-face with her own mortality; the temporary nature of the human condition. She did not have the energy to deal with again.

The same small thing that whispered in the back of her mind knew as well as she did that she was indeed dying. A few days, a few weeks, a month… she would not be alive at the same time next year, no matter how well the two pathogens that had made a home (and battlefield) in her body managed to keep each other at bay. Sooner or later, one of them would take home the trophy, and that was the day that she would lose.

Adamantly pulling her conscious mind out of it, she settled down on her back on the pallet, placing a handful of magazines and newspapers on her stomach.

When Vaun returned she was mentally trying to do a crossword in the Times, lacking a pen. She shifted her gaze from the infuriating activity and looked at him.

“What happened?” he asked her without preamble.

The black-and-red marbles that were his eyes shone like embers in the dim light.

“What do you mean?”

Indicating the room with a sweeping motion, he told her that he could smell the sick that she had cleaned up.

“Oh. That. I wasn’t feeling all that great after our last conversation.”

“I know,” he said, his subvocals growing even deeper. “But it is not up to me. This is an order from… them.”

“Them?” she asked, but changed her mind quickly. “Nevermind, I don’t want to know. At least not at the moment.”

She tossed her issue of Times aside and shifted the pile of papers off her stomach.

“Tell me one thing,” she said, sitting up. “What are you?”

“What?”

“What are you?” she repeated. “You look… not quite like them, but neither do you look human by any stretch. How come you’re not like them?”

“Ah,” he said, sitting down on the crate where he had been sitting the first time she clapped eyes on him. “I am something else. A cross-breed. Hybrid.”

“You mean…”—she regarded him curiously— “... you have one human parent and one… _strigoi_ parent?”

A corner of his strange Glasgow smile mouth twisted minutely. She would have thought that such a thing as a smile from him would be terrifying, but it was not. Rather, it made her feel a little better in some queer way.

“Yes, but not in the way that you may think. My creation wasn’t quite so… natural.”

“Huh,” she said, rising and walking over to the storage cabinet that held the food. 

She had noticed that she felt hungry more often than normal. Not starving by any stretch, but a small shadow of hunger was there all the time. Pulling out a can of salted peanuts, she returned to sit on the bed, crunching on her least favorite type of nuts. Beggars couldn’t, after all, be choosers and get all the cashews they wanted all the time. Peanuts would have to do. There was silence for a few moments, only interrupted by the crunching of her jaws as her molars crushed the kernels.

“I’ve stopped trying to apply scientific principles to this whole thing,” she said then, sucking crumbs out of her teeth. “If something’ll drive you crazy, that’s it. Tell me then. Tell me how someone like you is created.”

“My mother was bitten and infected by _strigoi_. When this happens, the worms infect the fetus and it is born _strigoi_ , but with its own… mind. Beyond control. Beholden to no one.”

“Transplacental vampirism, eh?” she said, chuckling unsoundly at her own little joke. “Sorry. Your own mind? Granted, it’s not hard to see that those things in the streets don’t have much in the upstairs department, but they are… controlled?”

Vaun cracked his neck slightly and lowered his hood, giving her a short nod. This time, his visage wasn’t as alien to her. It was, in fact, a far cry from the bloodsuckers that crawled in the street. His skin, alternatingly smooth and marred, reminded her of pale marble with its natural striations of iron oxide bleeding through the stone.

Perhaps it was the fact that he was the only stable element in her current situation, or perhaps it was just the scientist in her, but his appearance was more interesting than anything.

She could feel little tendrils of tentative companionship pass between them as they conversed in this most ordinary manner, even though the subject matter was anything but. And after all, he was likely the closest thing to a friend that she would have before the inevitable happened. Here, or in the world outside.

“The _strigoi_ can be controlled by the higher hierarchy of their kind,” he explained. “But us… Born ones, cannot be controlled in that manner.”

“There are more of your… kind?”

“A few,” he allowed, “Not many.”

* * *

She considered him for some time, this human named Natalie. He hadn’t detected fear in her once since entering the rooms. Instead, her mien carried a well-hidden type of melancholy. Vaun could hardly blame her for it. If nothing else, he felt a sensation of kinship with her—they were both dead, in their own way.

“So,” she said then, “You fight against the _strigoi._ ”

He nodded in the affirmative.

“But, uh… aren’t they your kind? Why would you want them eradicated?”

“Because we are not like them,” he snarled, more severely than he intended. “An ancient accord was broken. We hunt down those who flout it. These transgressors have plans for your kind that will…”

He broke off suddenly, feeling the forbidding presence of the Ancients behind his eyes where they poked at his cerebellum with angry claws. Natalie looked at him quizzically, a small frown forming on her brow.

“Plans?” she echoed, tilting her head.

“Nevermind,” he said, relieved when the castigation in his mind receded. “They will be stopped. They _must_ be stopped.”

She nodded, her body giving a small, involuntary shudder. When she released a shaking breath, he could smell the scent of the other parasite in her blood, and he sensed immediately that it had, temporarily at least, gained the upper hand. He could vaguely feel it working within her veins, how insidiously it hid inside of the components of her blood and how ruthlessly it savaged them in the process of its own procreation.

It did not escape him how ironically similar it was to _strigoi,_ and it only added to what he had always known— _strigoi_ were parasites. _He_ was part parasite.

“Somehow,” she whispered, interrupting his thoughts, “I am glad that I will probably not be around to see how bad things get before they get better.”

“How do you feel?” he asked her, suddenly.

Her gray-green eyes narrowed slightly, her shoulders tensing.

“Why?”

“I scented the other organism just now. It is… surging. What happens when it does?”

A small flicker of fear crossed her pale face then, and she shifted uncomfortably.

“I may die,” she said, matter-of-factly, but her voice wavered. “The _Plasmodium_ cycle will start again, if it’s truly on the upswing. Chills, first. Then the fever. Shit.”

Vaun rose, but nearly recoiled when she moved faster than he had ever seen her do. Nearly too fast for a human, but he pushed that thought away immediately. His stinger convulsed and gurgled when her small hand closed around his wrist. Her cool touch and the scent of her female flesh so close to him was both tantalizing and extremely disconcerting.

Her fingers tightened around him, her short, uneven fingernails tugging at the fabric surrounding his wrist. A couple of her fingers slipped, coming into contact with the skin between his sleeve and glove. Something in his lower abdomen shifted painfully and his treacherous stinger emerged at the back of his throat, rattling.

“Don't leave,” she whispered, and he glimpsed the fragile humanity inside of her.

“Please, Vaun,” she begged, her voice cracking and sounding nearly child-like. “Don’t leave. I am so… fucking alone. I am so fucking _scared_.”

Her other hand grasped his upper arm, and she forced her body into his, her face flush with his chest. The shock was enough to immobilize him, though the same could not be said for his stinger. It swelled with hungry delight at the back of his throat. If he had an actual biological need for air, it would have suffocated him.

“Don’t leave me alone,” she pleaded again, her words muffled by his black vest.

Even the deep churring sounds that came from him did nothing to dislodge her. So he simply stood there, awkwardly, allowing her to cling to him as if he was the only constant at the end of her life, when all other things had become variables.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading the third chapter! Hopefully you are enjoying it, and let’s hope I haven’t mangled canon too badly. Because I _am_ fond of doing that. =D If you want to know more about the parasites mentioned in this chapter, Google any of their genus names, and you’ll probably find the nastiest species right at the top of the results. I love protozoan parasites, but many of them are truly horrifying.
> 
> And again, an endless thank you to all of you who left me kudos and comments. They are always so very much appreciated.


	4. Chapter 4

Within no more than half a day, Natalie’s estimations of the progress of her malaria were proven correct. When her chills started, Vaun ordered one of his hunters to find the medical kit that was kept in the opposite wing of the compound.

It had proven handy in the past when human hunters had sustained damage, even though it had been difficult for their _strigoi_ counterparts when blood trickled as the humans patched up their non-infected wounds. The items in the kit were old, but he hoped that perhaps there was something in it that could help her.

But before the hunter returned, her violent shivering dissipated. The temperature of her flesh started rising ominously quickly instead, creeping ever upwards by tiny fractions of degrees. Even from a dozen feet away, he could feel the difference in her body heat as she squirmed on the pallet, the blankets knotted around her. The change was alarmingly obvious to him even though his own temperature ran far higher than that of her kind.

He approached the pallet and looked down at her. Her eyes were unseeing and glassy with malaise. Her clothes were soaked with sweat, the fabrics clinging to her sticky body as she tossed herself about and groaned incomprehensible noises. The scent of her sweat was tainted with the smell of the invaders that capered in her bloodstream.

To his chagrin, her temperature just kept climbing.

After he had assured her that he would stay to look after her, she had told him that if her fever ran too high her body would need to be cooled down. If her temperature was high enough, she had said, she might not be able to act upon it by herself or even be aware of her surroundings. She had named it hyperpyrexia, a fever high enough that it could be life-threatening.

He wasn’t certain of what constituted this hyperpyrexia in humans, but he knew that when he looked into her blank gaze, he could not see her anymore. What he saw was an unnerving void the color of dying leaves.

Vaun made a decision. Crouching by the pallet, he reached out for her. When he touched her skin, she screamed in pain, but he ignored it as best as he could and picked her up.

“It hurts!” she wailed suddenly when he hoisted her up. “It hurts! I don’t want to!”

She was able to worm out of his grasp for a moment, but he caught her with an arm around her waist. He wasn’t even aware of the fact that he was snarling deeply until he heard it ring in his own ears.

Something fundamentally primal was awakened by her whimpers and his own responding growls. It twined tightly inside of him and then reached through his body, igniting nerves that had been deadened for a long time. It was not a predator borne out of the bloodlust of the _strigoi_. It was one of pure congenital maleness, an intrinsic response to the writhing female body in his arms.  

With a low arduous groan, he pushed the unsettling urges away and reminded himself of the blood and violence and grief when he had last allowed those compulsions to overtake his mind and body.

Concentrating again on the rising temperature in her, he pulled her backwards into his body. He yanked her wrists behind her and between their bodies with one hard motion and clasped his other arm around her chest. Thus restrained, he started dragging her toward the shower room.

When she started to call for the woman that had once borne her, he clenched his jaws together so hard that white pains shot upward through his gums and into his head. His teeth ground together tightly enough that he thought he may shatter a few of them.

It felt like he was bringing her to the Ancients for feeding, and the thought alone nearly made him lose his grip. So many times had he secured the humans like this, pushing and dragging them to their deaths. And so many times had he regarded them as bothersome animals.

When he finally got her to the showers and relinquished his grasp to turn the water on, she snarled and managed to backhand him hard across the face. A ragged edge of a fingernail left a tiny scratch on his cheek. His animalistic instincts surged at the attack, and his stinger readily surged with them. Before he realized what was happening, it shot out of his throat with an uncanny squeal of glee and darted toward hers.

Vaun recoiled hard when the needle-sharp center proboscis sank into the area above her right clavicle and through the shirt she was wearing, missing the external carotid artery that his predatory subconscious was most likely aiming for. The fleshy petals on either side of the stinger curled and closed around the puncture, scratching impotently at the fabric for purchase.

Apparently heedless of where it was anchored, the thing started to nurse grotesquely by its own volition, its axon pulsing obscenely as it tried to draw as much blood from the area as possible. There wasn’t much as it had failed to hit a major artery, but there was enough for him to give a ragged moan around his stinger at the taste of minute quantities of human blood.

Vaun could hear the emptiness of the organ where it had invaded.  Its sound was a meaty version of a clogged drain trying to suck down dishwater. Natalie wailed hoarsely, her face contorted in confused horror and agony. Her small, white hands sank into the writhing appendage, yanking it out of her flesh in one violent motion that made the puncture at her clavicle rip open.

He staggered backwards, fighting to retract his stinger as soon as it was out of her flesh. Tilting his head back and placing his fingers underneath his chin, he pushed hard at the hyoid bone in his throat, the inwards pressure sending tendrils of pain and little creaking sounds into his head. The action made the invasive organ slacken enough to allow him to swallow it back into the thoracic cavity where he kept it caged.

Natalie had scrambled into a corner of the shower by the time he managed to get his stinger fully under his control again. Her wild eyes were now fixed on something that only she could see, his assault apparently forgotten in the midst of another fever-induced phantasm.

He approached her again, attempting to speak to her gently, but there was no reaching her. Her temperature had climbed another fraction of a degree, so he grabbed her by her forearms and pulled her up. She started to struggle again, but he pinned her wrists behind her and dragged her to the nearest shower. Punching the button that started the contraption, he positioned them both underneath the showerhead a few seconds before the pipes clanked and water spewed out, drenching them both, clothes and all.

Her scream of agony when the cool water hit her burning skin was almost more than he could bear. She arched and struggled and bucked, begged for it to stop and called out names unknown to him.

Then she started to call out to him.

“Vaun, you said you’d be there, you _said!_ It hurts, I'm alone, I don’t wanna die alone...”

“I am here,” he told her, but she had already started to moan of other things, most likely people and events from the life that she had led before she was corrupted.

Drawing her thrashing body down onto the tile floor with him, he leaned his back into the wall and pulled her to his chest. He splayed his legs on either side of her, bending his knees and planting his booted feet as firmly as he could into the slippery tiles. Clasping his arms around her, he held her still as the water forced her temperature to cool down gradually from its dangerous levels.

After a few moments, her legs stopped their kicking and her cries faded into soft whimpers, only to cease completely. He realized that she had fallen unconscious. He made a rattling sound of relief, and eased his hold on her a little.

Her head was resting on his shoulder, her face wet and flushed crimson with fever and exertion but relaxed in unconsciousness. Carefully, he wiped aside her dark strands of hair that had glued themselves to her face. When his fingers brushed wetly over her pale pink mouth, he could not suppress a profound shudder.

He craned his neck to ensure that her heartbeat was still thumping out its usual rhythm and found hers vastly elevated, but still very much there.

And there he sat and held her, wet and weary and nearly starving, allowing the cool water to drench them both. He could still discern the taste of her savory blood in the back of his throat. It made him purr briefly and without realizing it, he nuzzled the side of her face to get closer to the source. The ripped puncture that his proboscis had left in her flesh flowed with the red scent of life, and he wanted so desperately to sate his thirst with it.

But the smell of the parasites was there with it, and once he became aware of it, the taste of them thickened bitterly in his gullet as well. He was grateful for it. If it hadn’t been for the organisms in her blood, he would not have been willing nor able to force his stinger to retreat.

Concentrating on the sound of her heartbeat again instead, he leaned his head back into the tiled wall as the artificial rain continued to fall.

* * *

Natalie woke slowly, a bit resistant to leave the comfortable cloud of sleep that had cradled her. Opening her eyes, she blinked at the light in the room, even though it was no more than just a dull glow.

This was one of the worst things about this disease, she decided, this deceptive feeling of complacent wellness in between cycles of sickness. She had read about it and documented it for years, but it was quite a different thing to experience it. And she did feel physically fine, if not a bit weak and thirsty.

An intermittent susurrus of purrs hummed close by, and she realized that she was quickly becoming accustomed to the sounds of the strange creature named Vaun.

His vocalizations soothed her. On some profound level that she was not aware of, they assured her that she was not alone. The sick irony of it all was that she had always valued solitude above all else, and here she was, desperately craving the company of a non-human creature.

 _Half-human,_ she corrected herself, drawing the blankets up to her chin again.

Another soft rattling noise reverberated through the air. She had heard that sound from him before, and to her it sounded for all the world like the rattle of a diamondback, though much slower and lower pitched.

She turned her head slowly to glance at Vaun where he slouched on his crate, likely resting in that strange way. His upper body was bare, his pale skin a network of dark scars, their lines raised like embroidery. The bare head with its oddly pointed ears hung between his shoulders, elbows supported on his knees. The long, thin cordage of his muscles were relaxed in his slumber.

The sight of his bare skin made her pause. A tiny sense of warmth crept into her cheeks, and she felt like she was scrutinizing something that was meant to stay hidden and secret. The fact that he was indeed profoundly male somehow snapped smartly between the nerves in her brain.

The memory of his torrid phantom breath prickled at the back of her neck.

 _Well, isn’t that just a whole mess of shit you don’t need to be considering right now,_ she told herself.

She did have other things to contemplate at the present. She cursed the insidiousness of her false feeling of wellness once more.

When she moved to sit up, she felt a stabbing pain at her clavicle.

“Son of a bitch,” she swore out loud with a scratchy, hoarse voice that bespoke of the fact that she had apparently done a lot of screaming since she was last fully conscious.

 _Shit, I sound like Janis Joplin and I like it,_ she thought.

What weird, pathetic pleasures she found in her bleak reality.

Vaun’s eyes blinked open at her exclamation, his body straightening into its normal bearing, austere and rigid like a statue.

“What’s the matter?” he asked, his voice not-at-all sleepy, which was infuriating for some reason.

By this time, she Natalie had discovered that she was no longer wearing what she had been before the cycle started. A pair of men’s shorts reached to her knees when she tossed the blankets aside, their gaudy Hawaiian print almost burning holes in her retinas. A gray undershirt completed the ensemble.

_Well, isn't that just marvelous. He's seen me naked._

Ignoring the embarrassing thought, she stretched slightly. Her skin felt tight and somehow grainy, and she soon realized that it was from copious amounts of her own dried sweat. She could say with a reasonable amount of confidence that she smelled of brine shrimp and stagnant pond scum.

“What happened.. here?” she motioned vaguely at her aching clavicle, and continued before Vaun could respond. “And… my clothes?”

“Your temperature was high,” he said, his dual-toned voice deadpan. “You requested to be cooled down if this happened. I took you to the showers. I carried you back and changed your clothes. The ones you were wearing were wet. You were still sweating a lot after, but your temperature continued to drop.”

She noticed then that a black heap of tactical clothing was piled next to the crate where he had rested, looking for all the world like the a wet and lumpy tomcat lounging about. He was wearing pants that she had seen in the cabinet stash; a pair of dark brown cargos that hung low enough on his narrow white hips to make her blink.

_Weird pleasures._

“I see,” she said, wincing as she rolled her right shoulder. “And this?”

Vaun looked rather uncomfortable at that, but explained without hesitation.

“So… you bit me.”

“Yes.”

“Because I clocked you one?”

“It was instinctive,” he told her. “It was not my intent. I will close it for you.”

“That’s not necessary,” she said, rising.

“I insist, Natalie,” he replied and rose.

Walking over to the tiny hallway that led to the bathroom, he retrieved a bulky cooler, the white styrofoam plastered with the garish logo of some sports team or another. She stifled a giggle when he approached her, this half-naked, half-vampire being, carrying a cooler in a most collegiate-tailgate-party way.

His red-and-black eyes looked at her quizzically when he sat down on her pallet, motioning for her to sit down again.

“Sports fan, huh?” she chuckled when he bent down and opened the cooler at his feet.

He straightened, alcohol wipes and a roll of medical tape in hand.

“What?”

“Yeah, me neither,” she quipped, and watched his puzzlement grow. “Nevermind.”

Vaun nodded and indicated that he wanted her to turn toward him, so she did. His unnaturally hot fingers tore open a few of the alcohol wipe packets. A string of strangled curses erupted from her when the isopropanol came in contact with the angry red tissue.

“How did you get these scars?” he asked her suddenly, pausing in his work. “They are peculiar.”

His other hand raised to touch the darkened spots that dotted her upper body. He stroked her upper arm, his outlandishly warm touch then softly travelling to her shoulder.

Her breath quaked when his fingers dragged up the column of her throat and traveled along her jawline to brush over one last handful of the dusky marks. He thumbed her chin briefly before withdrawing and resuming the task of cleaning her wound.

She was too stunned to speak for a few moments, clenching her teeth hard against the queer sensations that his touch had evoked.

“Acne scarring,” she said then, grateful that her voice did not squeak stupidly.

“Acne?”

“Skin condition. Inflammatory, but non-contagious. More common in adolescents, but some of us have it for longer than that. Sometimes, people take medications to control it, but there is no cure.  In some cases, it’ll go away for no apparent reason. And sometimes it leaves scarring, like in my case.”

“Strange,” Vaun replied, and she was a bit surprised that she could not detect any distaste in his voice.

Many people still clung to the arcane idea that chronic acne was the result of poor hygiene, rather than having a genetic or hormonal cause. Her father had suffered from acne well into his forties, leaving behind deep scarring on the lower part of his face. She had managed to get hers under control with isotretinoin prescribed by her dermatologist, but the scarring remained.

She often told herself that she did not really care about the dark patterns that traversed her otherwise pale skin, but her vanity was never as easily fooled as all that.

“When did yours go away?”

“Ah, a couple of years ago. I was twenty-seven. I took medication to get rid of it.”

He simply nodded and said nothing more, continuing his work with careful efficacy.

“Vaun,” she said after a few minutes as he was closing the wound with the white, sticky tape. “I would like to go to my place. Just… maybe pick up some things.”

“No,” came his clipped answer.

He rose and closed the cooler and went to place it back where he had retrieved it.

“I’d come back,” she said quickly, and she started a little when she realized that she probably would. “I need some of my things… something familiar.”

“You will not be allowed.”

 _“Hey!”_ she shouted, the word a short, snapping bark.

She was pleased to see a slight flinch in his stature when he placed the cooler back in the hallway.

She hopped up from her pallet and stalked toward him. He did not recoil, not even when she rounded on him, bristling. She stared into his eyes, craning her neck. He was not overly tall, but he still had a good six or seven inches on her.

“I _am_ going to my place,” she snarled, not even sure where she found this courage, even though she knew that it was really only a facsimile of true bravery. “We both know that I’m fucking _dying_. I need some stupid shit from my dorm to make me feel a bit better.”

He watched her, calm as ever, but she thought she saw a tiny flicker or something in his eyes.

“Yes, I know it’s goddamn pathetic,” she continued, incensed, “but I don’t give a shit right now. I’ll come right back like a good little dog. Hell, you can come with me if that’ll make you happy. But I _am_ going. I am _not_ dying here without at least some things from the life that I am about to lose.”

With that, she turned away from him, her tattered throat scratchy again form her diatribe. She put a hand to the wall, steadying herself and coughing until the itching faded.

* * *

The Ancients had felt her indignant anger flare in their sleep. Now semi-awake, they lazily drifted into Vaun’s consciousness like a gray fog, insubstantial but still inexplicably solid. He relaxed, allowing them the free reign that they demanded and let them pinch and prod at his thoughts.

_You think that she should be allowed on this excursion._

It was not a question, rather an unequivocal statement.

 _What I think is of no consequence,_ he told them. _I will go with her if you consent to it, Ancient Ones. She can retrieve her items, and the end of her life will be a little more joyful._

_What care we of her joy?_

He hated it when they grew this disconnected. He hated that he himself quickly did the same if there was no human component in his reality.

He knew that he was taking a big risk when he spoke next.

_I see no harm in letting her have some meaningless comforts for the life that she does have left. You know of the Master’s plans for the humans. If we keep her caged like an animal and deny her even a quick death, how can we claim to be different?_

There was no response, so he plunged ahead before his resolve could wane.

_How can we claim to fight for their kind while we simply watch one of their own die, alone and tortured and frightened; for the sake of an organism that, even if successful in eradicating the worms, will not allow its host to survive after? The necessary feeding deaths seem a great mercy in comparison. It would be kinder to kill her now._

There was a silence that seemed to stretch on for eons. He felt sure that this warranted a merciless cerebral comeuppance. The last time he had received such a punishment, his temples had thundered with an agony so sharp and profound that pale blood had started to leak out of his ears and eyes.

And he was not even sure why he would risk the agony for one human.

He remembered the outlandish feel of her soft body as she held him desperately, begging for companionship. He had perceived her true scent underneath the smell of _strigoi_ and malaria. She still smelled of the sunlight that had last touched her. She smelled of wombs and the organic, sleek oils that human skin produced.

 _We are pleased to see you regain your humanity once again, Born,_ they whispered into his mind. _Too soon after our late human hunter did you allow your innermore_ strigoi _to influence you._

He blinked at that, not a little surprised. He had never considered that the Ancients would bother to reach their awareness into his human side, or concern themselves with his inner countenance. For as long as he had been their agent, they had never taken him unawares in this manner.

 _Take her to her dwelling,_ they said then, and he felt them starting to recede from his mind. _Escort her and protect her. Her condition is important, but her humanity is, as well._

 _And Born,_ they echoed before the last vestige of their presence faded. _Feed before you go. Another life to protect millions. This is the paradox of our existence. And of yours._

And with that, they left him.

* * *

It took a good three hours by Natalie’s estimation before they were able to leave. Vaun had dissappeared for a couple of those hours, presumably to dress in his regular clothing. She thought that such a task shouldn’t take all that long, unless he was simply the most metrosexual half-vamp in the world.

He returned though, and with him came a sense of lukewarm vitality that she hadn’t felt in him before. When she scrutinized his face closely, she noticed that some color had seeped into it. Actually, it was not color per se, as he remained as pallid as ever. It was more like the absence of color was less tangible. His skin seemed less translucent; the alternatingly smooth and marred surface holding a faint, intriguing pearlescence.

Natalie had pulled on some jeans and a sweater that smelled slightly of aftershave, as if whoever wore it last hadn’t washed it well. Vaun provided her with a pair of black boots and some outerwear; a dark navy parka with a fur-lined hood that made her think of the front cover of _The Thing,_ John Carpenter, circa eighty-two or eighty-four, she couldn’t remember which.

And somehow, that in turn made her wonder how old her companion-in-death was.

He led her through the labyrinth of the concrete compound to something that looked for all the world like a smaller version of a parking garage; capable of housing around ten large SUVs but currently only held four.

He surprised her by motioning to the passenger seat, taking the driver’s seat himself. She hadn’t even entertained the idea of them being underground until they ascended through a tunnel with a patch of bleak light glowing at its far end.

When they had emerged into the semi-darkness of the dusk outside and she cast a glance back, she realized that it was some type of industrial building, perhaps a factory or refinery, with underground and aboveground counterparts. She turned back in her seat then, fastening her eyes on the road.

Vaun drove with the ease of someone who had done so for a long time, a hand gloved in black firmly on the top of the steering wheel. They both remained silent for some time as the sky darkened outside and the faraway lights of the city started to wink to life.

“Hey,” she said after some time, “Thanks. For taking me to my dorm.”

A guttural trill emerged from him, cutting through the muted droning of the engine. She wondered how those sounds could emerge from him when he gave no outward signs of vocalizations. It was a strange type warbling, secret and predatory.

Since her latest _Plasmodium_ cycle, she had been able to recall small snatches of cognizant moments in the nightmare fog of her fever. They were like the flickering of a dying flashlight in the darkness, not enough to quite know what was happening but enough to know that _something_ was.

She remembered his body being close to hers, remembered his primal noises as they traveled out of his gullet and reverberated through her. They had been calming in the terrifying world that she had been trapped in.

Thankfully, she remembered little of her hallucinations, only that they had been accompanied by a claustrophobic feeling of being trapped; buried alive beneath black, heavy boulders, and no matter how much she called out to people that she had known, no matter how much she cried for her mother, no one had come.

But she had been able to hear his sounds through the wall of spectral stone as they reached through her skin, into her flesh and into her bones, creating tiny, soothing oscillations in her body. The feeling of claustrophobia had remained, but it had been easier to bear.

The fur on the hood of her parka tickled at her cheek, and she swiped at it, eventually just lowering _The Thing_ -thing that hugged her face like a fat, fuzzy caterpillar. Giving Vaun a sidelong glance, she spoke again.

“Vaun, how old are you?”

A contemplative clacking sound came from him before he replied. His eyes remained on the road ahead.

“I am not sure. Time moves differently when you’re not quite human."

“Well, what’s your earliest memory?”

He did not reply for some time, the uncomfortable silence between them stretching until she thought that he wouldn’t answer her at all. When he did reply, his voice was preceded by a growl that startled her a little with its cold note of enmity.

“My earliest memory is when I crawled out of the worm-ridden womb of the woman who carried me. My growth accelerated once she was infected. I became aware too early in a way that should not be. I can still feel the thick taste of her corrupted womb in which I slumbered.”

His eyes flickered to her for only a second before returning to the world in front of them, a world now bathed in the indigo of early night.

“She was already _strigoi_ when I emerged. Her body was ripped open, yet she crawled, innards out in the dirt, trying to follow a human scent she had caught. I was alone.”

Natalie wondered how one was supposed to respond to something like that. Here was a man who had been slated to come into the world alive, red and squalling, until it was cruelly yanked away from his barely formed grasp by the virulent stinger of a _strigoi_.

It made her hate them even more. If there hadn’t been any other reason for her to loathe the _strigoi,_ this one truly twisted something inside of her until it threatened to tear. A natural process of such beautiful creation had been perverted into an absolute antithesis of life.

And yet somehow, it had produced this unique creature who would see her to the end, despite the instincts that no doubt hassled him endlessly.

Not knowing what else to do, she carefully placed a hand on his black-clad thigh. It struck her only the second after that he might construe it as something else, but by then it was too late for her to pull her fingers back without it looking completely awkward.

And she found that she didn’t really give a shit what he interpreted it as at the moment.

The heat of his flesh easily permeated the thick fabric of his trousers, smoldering into her palm.

“I’m sorry,” was all she said.

Vaun nodded, his face unmoving and his eyes dutifully upon the road. He did not acknowledge her hand on him. She kept it there as they silently watched the headlights of the SUV cleave the blackness before them.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ha! Today I figured out a way for me to remember how to efficiently solve certain chemical conversions that have been giving me trouble. I thought I deserved a few hours of writing after studying for five hours straight. And then I made crepes to celebrate my productivity. =D
> 
> As always, thank you for reading and for your support!
> 
>  **On Fever Hallucinations:** I've had a fever once in my life that was high enough to cause hallucinations, which can eventually cause proteins in your brain to denature (non-geek speak: your brain is going kaput because things are starting to come apart). All I can say of that experience is that the hallucinations were terrifying. I similarly experienced a sense of being trapped, but in my room, seeing stone blocking the only ways out. Drawing from that experience, I had poor Nat go through that, as well.
> 
>  **On Born:** I am not sure how the birth aspect itself of a Born works, since I haven't found any detail on how and when in the pregnancy they are born, if they are born from mothers who have turned strigoi, if only the fetus was infected and not the mother, etc. But then again, I haven't had the time to truly dig into it right now, so I shamefully winged it. If you know the exact details, do let me know, but I think I will keep it this way, at least for now. You are welcome to spank me for this.
> 
>  **On Smushing the Hyoid Bone:** This is a bone in your throat that's there to support your tongue. Gruesomely enough, it is often found fractured in homicide cases where the victim has been strangled. As far as Vaun applying pressure on it to force his stinger to go limp, yeah, I pulled that out of my ass. I mean I pulled the idea out of my ass, not his stinger.


	5. Chapter 5

The campus of her university was almost deserted. It was an otherworldly sight in a place such as this, usually alive with the hustle and bustle of university life. They parked in the asphalt lot nearest to her dorm, just in case there still was such an entity as campus security that would frown upon parking on the lawn in front of her dorm.

She wagered that her companion would probably elicit some awkward questions from security guards, and she was fairly sure that such an exchange would not end well. For the guards.

A few students scurried about like frightened cockroaches with packs stuffed full of miscellany. They cast nervous, flickering glances at her and her pale companion. Vaun, for his part, kept his head lowered when they passed others, the students’ haunted eyes often sweeping over his strange paramilitary gear and the smaller weapons strapped to his legs.

Thankfully, she had convinced him to leave the larger gun in the car. Natalie knew next to nothing about guns, but the thing he had almost brought looked like it would take down a freaking roided-up horse. They did not need any extra attention.

She could hear his rattles when they passed a few students, the sounds somehow laced with agitation.

Somewhere in the distance, they heard the screeches of _strigoi_ , and it made her wonder if she would sing in a similar manner one day.

 _Fuckin’ A,_ the part of her mind that wanted to preserve her sanity spat. _Let it go. You’ll die, yes. But what good will it do to brood on it? Is that really how you want to spend the time you have left? Take it one day at a time, for fuck’s sakes. If there’s one time in your life that you need some of Hank’s purple kush, it’s now._

 _You’ll be white and dead and feeding on the blood of those who once were your fellow humans,_ another voice murmured in a most Machiavellian manner. _Your brain will be dead muck and you’ll just be a puppet on strings._

She bit the inside of her cheek and concentrated on chewing on the soft flesh there, instead. The thin membrane there was easy to worry with her molars.

It did not take them long to reach her dorm building where it squatted like a large, architectural toad in the darkness. Vaun stopped for a moment before they entered, his red-black eyes examining a few buildings that were located opposite to her dorm, their façades facing the road that separated them from the dormitory complex.

The lifeless house of Kappa Alpha Theta was there, its gray and winter-dead landscaping still infuriatingly manicured. The house of Phi Beta Sigma was similarly darkened. The weeping willow in its front yard sported drooping streamers of toilet paper that traversed its bare cascading branches, likely the product of some transfraternal prank.

And incredibly, she saw Vaun smirk for a few moments, which made her own mouth quirk slightly, as well.

“Something funny?”

He turned to her with that strange little half-smile on the mouth that looked like it had smiled enough to split its corners wide open, even though she had seen enough of _strigoi_ to know that the elongated mouth had causes that were not nearly as affable.

“The lettering on those buildings,” her companion said, pointing with a gloved hand to the blocky, white Greek lettering that adorned the houses. “A comrade of mine traveled the Byzantine Empire when this writing was widely used.”

“The _Byzantine Empire_?” Nat huffed with disbelief.

Granted, it had been quite a while since her prerequisite history classes, and it was by far her least favorite subject. But even she knew that he was telling her that his buddy had been meandering across an ancient empire that had long since fallen.

She was about to tell him that he was full of shit, but thought better of it.

Really, what rules of the erstwhile world still applied? How many things had she been exposed to in a short time that had effectively decimated her belief that science had uncovered most of the mysteries of the natural world?

Maybe science just hadn’t gotten to the mysteries of the unnatural world before everything went straight to hell.

The elongated corners of Vaun’s mouth stretched further, and in his eyes she saw a gleam of something that she could only interpret as genuine amusement.

“Fine,” she huffed with mock irritation, “You know, immortality is considered to be a very rude trait to have. Don’t tell the DnD’ers, they _hate_ god-modding.”

“What?”

She rolled her eyes with a smirk and grabbed the handle of one of the double doors before them, pulling it open. The door gave a familiar metallic groan, which was somehow reassuring.

“Don’t worry about it. Your friend, the Byzantine globetrotter, is he still alive?”

“After a fashion.”

“Is he like you?” she asked as they walked into the outdated vestibule of the building.

Vaun remained silent for a moment, seemingly scanning their surroundings before looking back at her.

“If you mean a half-breed, then yes. He was the one who took me into his ranks, who taught me. He is my brother, in a way.”

“So you’re the same.”

They headed for the stairwells that would take them to any of the four floors. She was not about to trust the elevator, even though the lights were still on in the hallways.

“Not quite,” Vaun told her as they started to ascend the stairs. “Which floor?”

“Third. How are you different?”

In her curiosity about his comrade, she stumbled slightly over a step. Vaun’s hand shot to her shoulder to steady her, and she nodded her thanks before they continued. Fuck, but she hated stairs, but the landing of the second floor told her that they were nearly there.

“Why this curiosity?” he growled, sounding slightly amused.

It was irritating that he showed no outward signs of exertion, and here she was huffing like the Big Bad Wolf. Yep, minimal exercise and the handful of extra pounds caused a natural rift of profound enmity between her and stairs.

 _I’ll huff, and I’ll puff, and I’ll blow my lungs out,_ she thought.

“Just because. Tell me.”

“Very well,” he said. “Naturally, we share many traits due to what we are. But other things are different.”

He paused then, considering her for a few seconds as he pulled open the door that she indicated would lead them to the floor where her dorm was. His gaze was scrutinizing; calculating.

“For example, he can tolerate the light of the sun,” he said then, quietly. “I cannot.”

“So… sunlight will hurt you?”

“Yes. I can tolerate it in small amounts. It is not pleasant, but I can handle it. However… if it is strong enough, and the exposure is prolonged, I will not survive.”

“Oh.”

She didn’t ask him anything else. It seemed that every time she did ask him something, the conversation invariably lead to some permutation of death. She wasn’t able to dwell on it for long before a terrible, squealing scream sounded in the dim hallway.

A couple of matching sounds joined the first screech, combining into a terrible howl that carried with it the echo of the grave. By the time she looked up and recoiled, three _strigoi_ were almost upon them, leaping and clawing toward her.

Their jaws were unlocked and gaping greedily like those of hatchling birds, their wet stingers reaching for her flesh like fat, whipping snakes, shrieking and pulsing obscenely with bloodlust.

She gave a loud bellow of fright and stumbled backwards into Vaun’s body. With one smooth motion, he pushed her aside and she heard the ripping of velcro like a raspy gunshot. One proboscis went flying, no longer attached to its owner. It hit the linoleum floor with a wet smack, jerking and writhing with white blood and worms dribbling from its severed end.

The spinal column of a second _strigoi_ was quickly bisected with the black Bowie knife in Vaun’s white hand, its blade easily eight inches long. The third and final creature received similar treatment. The _strigoi_ whose stinger had been detached simply scrabbled about madly for a few moments before it was dispatched, as well.

Pearly white blood collected in little puddles on the floor, the worms wriggling wretchedly in response to the sudden onslaught of cold air. Thin ribbons of steam rose from their little squirming entozoan bodies.

She peeled herself off the wall to which she had been glued during the altercation. Adrenaline rushed through her system, the intoxicating feeling of the epinephrine prompting a characteristic fight-or-flight response, suppressing her initial horror and causing her body to shake almost uncontrollably. She leaned back to the wall for a few moments, sliding down along it into a crouch.

“Natalie?”

His voice sounded strange in the vacuum of her adrenaline kick. She heard the velcro again as he opened it to put the deadly steel away. Her spine quivered with the natural high of the adrenaline, making her feel alive in a way that she hadn’t for quite some time.

“I’m all right,” she said, taking his gloved hand when he offered it. “Caught me off guard.”

He nodded and pulled her up with a spontaneous trill. Her legs felt unsteady, but as the rush of adrenaline dissipated, so did the weakness in her limbs.

However, the dynamic feeling of simply being among the living did not.

Some strange things started to stir in her mind, but thankfully, she spotted the door to her dorm room before she could dwell on them further.

* * *

Vaun watched her try to jimmy open the door to her domicile for a few minutes, but aided her then by simply kicking the thing in for her. Advising her to hurry, he stationed himself by the open door to the tiny room, scenting the air and scanning the wavelengths of the strigoi to discern if any were in the vicinity.

He sensed one a few doors down, the frequency of its mind muddled with indecipherable human static. The disjointed cacophony indicated that it was a human infected, in the process of metamorphosis.

Vaun could not reach into a human mind. This was true of any _strigoi_ that he knew of, including the Ancient Ones and the Master. Their _strigoi_ minds simply could not wield any control over the human brain, their sleuthing thoughts unable to interpret the firing of live synapses. The language of the dead had no place in the minds of the living.

The Ancients, having dwelled in the world for years beyond count, were adept at sensing strong human emotion, should the source be close enough. Yet they could not invade the origin of the emotions, only listen impotently as it radiated outwards like rings on water, the center always obscured from true scrutiny.

The free will of humans was astounding to him.

True enough, he could choose not to hear the Ancients, which he was fairly grateful for. But they could beckon at the gates of his mind at any time. Even when they were not actively communicating, he could feel the faint hum of their presence at the base of his skull.

They never truly left his mind, but he endured it. Even though it displeased the Old Ones, he sometimes kept his mind closely guarded to them, on wavelengths that were a vestige of the human in him. But not for long, only long enough to allow him to keep some thoughts to himself for a few moments. Their cause was his own, after all.

But they could always force their way into his mind should they wish to. The little cerebral devices that he had taught himself could be circumvented by them.

Somehow, that was far worse. It was a weak replica of free will, yet similar enough that he sometimes desperately yearned for the real counterpart.

It did not take his human companion long to gather up a hodgepodge of items into a large blue container. Her mien grew more forlorn as she tossed various items into the plastic bin. After gently placing a worn shoe box on the top of her other things, she looked at him.

He remembered what her eyes had looked like when she had been feverish. Unnerving and empty and sick.

“This is harder than I thought,” she said then in a low voice. “These… things. They’re just things. And still, they will be all that will be left of me.”

Vaun did not know what to say to that, so he simply beckoned for her to come closer. When she did, he threaded his arms around her in the manner that she had done to him when she begged him to stay.

There was a small gasp from her as he folded her into his body, her shoulders and spine stiffening for a moment. But she relaxed after a few seconds and reciprocated, one hand clutching his shoulder blade and the other at his waist.

He rumbled by his own volition, a gravelly sound voicing the strange sensation of enjoyment that the proximity brought. It pleased him to no end that his stinger, sated after the blood meal that he had taken before they left, was silent for once.

It was so different from the first time that their bodies had been close.

She had taken him off guard then, and while her soft body was pleasant while pressed against him, the majority of sensations came from the hungry stinger in his chest. With it came memories of the human that he had last been close to, and what had happened to her when he forgot himself in a moment of violent desire. And once his teeth sunk into her soft flesh and her willingness turned into struggling, his inner _strigoi_ rose in response, spelling an end to their dalliance, and to her life.

And yet all he could think about at the moment was the melancholy human in his arms. The feel of her body, her true scent underneath the scent of her microbial invaders. The memory of the cool softness of her naked flesh as he changed her out of her soaked clothing. Her rounded, soft shapes and the dark little flecks that spotted her skin.

He had so badly wanted run his fingers over each one of them. Instead, he had clenched his jaws together and dressed her, trying not to touch her more than absolutely necessary. And still, his hands had to clutch her round hips briefly when he had pulled the garish shorts on her. His fingertips had skimmed across her small breasts when he clothed her in the undershirt. He wasn’t sure if it had been an accident or not.

The memory of her pale, naked flesh skittered down his spine and stirred something very substantial in his midsection as he held her. Then the sensation moved lower, and for a moment he almost panicked, knowing that the human part of his anatomy would react and stiffen against her. He was almost grateful when something broke their embrace.

A faint moan that, to him, carried the hallmark undertone of _strigoi_ reached them. It was the thing he had sensed earlier, the one that was becoming. Its metamorphosis was further along now; the human static of its dying cerebral activity becoming fainter, allowing the mind of a _strigoi_ to awaken and respond to its kin.

“What was that?” she asked, her eyes lifting to meet his.

He felt a wisp of her breath on his face.

“It’s _strigoi_. Or rather… it’s becoming one.”

“It’s a person?” She pulled back from him.

“Not any longer,” he told her. “We better leave. Stay in the hallway. It’s a few doors down. I must… eliminate it.”

It did not take him long to do so. The creature managed to croak out a mournful “Please, no” right before his hunting knife sawed into its neck. Its human voice was congested with the sound of a partly-developed stinger. He wiped his knife on a jacket that hung on a hook by the door.

For a moment, he caught a scent from the heavy fabric of the outerwear, a telltale scent of what the creature had been before it was corrupted. A normal, healthy male; young. The vigorous smell of his skin mixed with the scent of various hygienic products. There was a faint trace of some female as well; a mixture of the scent of her and his musky seed, especially near the bedding. He could smell the combined scent of their rutting, wet and pungent and yet, somehow sweet.

He wondered if the young man’s paramour was dead, as well. Or worse, corrupted.

His human comrade who was technically both waited for him outside, the blue storage bin clutched in her arms, her face more pallid than usual. They proceeded to retrace their steps back outside in silence.

The night was alive with sounds of more _strigoi_ , but thankfully, he could hear nor sense any in the immediate vicinity. Once they reached the vehicle, Natalie dumped her bin in the back seat and took her place in the passenger seat next to him. The silence between them was deafening, and he was not sure why.

A good quarter hour passed on their return journey before she spoke.

“Did you kill him?”

He blinked slowly, his hands tightening a little on the steering wheel.

“Yes.”

She said nothing else, and he surprised himself by speaking again after a few minutes.

“Did you know him?”

“Which dorm was it?”

He told her the door number of the room in which the corrupted male had been.

“Josh,” she said. “He was a chemistry major. Helped me out when I had some hissy fits while trying to do organic chemistry homework.”

“I am sorry,” he said, feeling for a moment that he just might be.

“No, you’re not,” she whispered flatly. “And one day soon, you’ll do the same to me.”

She fell silent after that, staring at the road before them. A heavy aching feeling made itself known in his chest, and for once, it was not his stinger. It was a very human sensation, and he welcomed it gladly, even though its deep throbbing was wholly unpleasant.

Neil’s face, his once-symmetrical features decimated by his bullet, flashed in front of his eyes.

The worst part was that she was right. He would have to euthanize her in a similar manner one day. He would have to steal the life out of her body, something that he in truth did not have the right to do, yet he would do it all the same because it was what he had always done. It was what needed to be done.

He had seen glimpses of the Master’s designs for the humans, and that scenario simply could not be allowed to come to pass.

Faceless humans of all colors crammed into steel cages, their naked flesh smeared with whatever urine and feces that did not make it through the grates of the bottom of the cage and into the designated waste gutters.

The bodies of small children who had once been healthy with chubby flesh and radiant pink skin hanging from butcher’s hooks. The ends of the shiny steel mercilessly poking through the space between little ribs, bending them asunder.

Humans who were not considered prime fare, the sick or old or otherwise less-than perfect for feeding or recruiting, were given to lesser _strigoi_ or simply killed outright. Their bodies were dumped on the streets as offal for once domesticated dogs turned feral.

Choice feeding pens for elevated _strigoi_ where the humans were force-fed almonds or peaches or even raw fatty tissue of their fellows in order to make the blood fuller and richer.

Breeding rooms where some humans were kept alive for their fertility so that they could be forced to breed the next generation of food for their undead masters. Mothers wailing when their newborns were ripped from their breast, their howls full of the dark insanity of someone exposed to endless horrors.

And if she did not die by malaria or by his hand, she would one day feed in these abattoirs. One day, her stinger would swell ravenously at the sight of a rotund human babe. She would have no qualms whatsoever about plunging her proboscis into its flesh, heedless of the shattering of delicate little bones or the cries of a being that was too young to even voice words of protest.

How could he _not_ kill her?

When they reached a strip of buildings that was the last before they crossed into the more rural areas where their hideout was, she told him to stop the car. He slowed the vehicle significantly, but did not stop entirely.

“Why?”

“Drugstore.”

She pointed at a building to their right. The lowest level did indeed feature large glass windows lined with colorful advertisements of all types. The steel-and-glass doors were wide open, the interior dark with the exception of a machine that advertised that it would take your blood pressure while you waited. Little green and red lights blinked on the digital panel.

“The place looks looted,” she said, “But I’m going to see if there’s anything of use in there. Food, meds… whatever. Stop the car.”

* * *

Vaun followed her inside, his clicks and faint murmuring growls adding a bit of sound to the otherwise silent store. Looking around, Natalie discovered that the place had indeed been looted well, but she wagered that she’d be able to find something of use among the disarray of wares that were strewn about.

First she examined the cashier’s stations. There was no money—surprise, surprise—but then again, it wasn’t like she’d really have use for cash in her current situation. She uttered a rather ghastly chuckle when she thought of the fact that one perk of this whole dying business was that she wouldn’t have to pay back substantial student loans.

She found a handful of lighters scattered over one of the conveyor belts, and she grabbed one after throwing a glance toward the darkness of the back of the store where she was ultimately headed.

After grabbing a shopping basket, she walked slowly toward the back of the store where the pharmacy was located. Vaun followed her, the silent padding of his feet lending her a weird kind of courage in the shadows that reminded her of the room where her cellmates had died.

The darkness soon swallowed them both, the faint red-and-green blinking of the blood pressure reader unable to reach them. The lighter gave enough light for her to scale the counter to the back of the pharmacy, but not much when it came to identifying labels on the dozen or so drugs that remained on the shelves. The metal of it soon grew too hot, blistering her fingers when she tried to light the thing again.

Vaun stood behind her, silent except for his trademark noises. She handed him a white, fat bottle of pills.

“How is your night vision?” she asked him, pointing to the bottle in his grasp. “Lighter’s too hot to use right now.”

“It’s good enough,” he answered, turning the bottle in his hand. “Coumadin.”

“Blood thinner,” she said, gathering up as many bottles as she could, placing them on the counter.

She went to the shelves, dumping another few armfuls onto the counter for his perusal.

“Acyclovir. Setraline. Benazepril. Ibuprofen…”

“The last one,” she said, interrupting his droning. “How many milligrams?”

He peered at the bottle for a few moments, before telling her that they were eight hundred milligrams.

“Perfect. Prescription strength anti-inflammatories. I’m going to see if there’s anything else of use.”

By the time they got back into the car, Natalie had managed to amass a little hoard of medications that she hoped would be of help next time she went through a _Plasmodium_ cycle.

In a stroke of nearly idiotic luck, she had found a small bottle of morphine, the clear, opiate liquid looking far too innocent compared to what it actually was. It was surprising, really, since narcotic substances seemed like they would be the first things looted in this type of apocalyptic scenario. But then again, she had only found this lone bottle hidden behind a dozen large bottles of diet pills.

She wasn’t quite sure what she would use the morphine for, but she supposed that it was a handy substance to have.

She had found a few hypodermic needles as well, still neat and sterile in their crinkly wrapping. She’d managed to gather some snacks; bags of salt and grease and preservatives and candies full of sugar and artificial coloring. The thought of such junk made her mouth water. She opened a bag of cheese curls in the car, staring sullenly at the road before them as she ate.

She didn’t speak to him. It had been shocking to hear him kill someone who was still… somewhat human. She had heard Josh’s strangled litany for mercy, and while she had never been close to the guy, it had reminded her of her own precarious condition. Vaun could, and _would_ , execute her as soon as the change was upon her.

In truth, the scientist in her could not blame him for it. It was the best thing to do in order to prevent yet another _strigoi_ -vector running around. After all, what would the medical community do when faced with an individual carrying an incurable and highly virulent contagion?

She knew the answer to that one without even having to think about it.

The infected individual would be quarantined. With no cure in sight, pallative care would be given until the disease ran its course and the patient died in a hermetically sealed bubble, suffering and completely alone apart from medical professionals in hazmat suits, peering through glass inches thick. The preferred method of disposal of the remains would be cremation by temperatures of nine-hundred degrees Celsius, or thereabouts.

Yes, her brain was very fond of hurling these syllogistics at her. But in the end, it was completely different when it was her own life on the line, even though she knew that one human life was completely insignificant from a global perspective, and even more so when considering the human species as a whole.

Her confusion and frustration about it all was compounded by what she had felt when he had shoved her aside to defend her from the attacking _strigoi_. It wasn’t even like she could be re-infected by them, but their savagery could easily spell death for her.

His body had moved like that of a cat, sleek and fast. The scent of him, a smell of heated earth, gun oil and maleness swirled around him as he twisted about, each burst of his scent that reached her making her insides twist. His predatory movements and growls and her surge of adrenaline had awakened something primal in her that she hadn’t felt before.

She wanted to tell herself that it was some type of Stockholm syndrome-like response. Or that her desperate, if pathetic need to have someone by her side at the end of her life had caused her to have some strange affinity for him.

Either could have been a simple and credible explanation for it all, had it not been for that primal tugging in her lower belly when she watched him dispatch their would-be dispatchers. It told her that the root cause did not matter; only the sensations did.

It wasn’t like she had never had lovers—she had, but as her degree studies became more advanced, she found little time for such things. And honestly, when compared to the microscopic world that went unseen by most, humans seemed profoundly uninteresting and predictable.

And now, when her old life mattered no longer, all urges and emotions that had taken a backseat came roaring back.

Fear of death, anxiety, and the appreciation for small things like the overly sweet taste of canned fruits. A combined sense of joy and despair at being alive yet another day. And then, of course, there was desire for closeness, for pleasure, perhaps her last chance at such things before she was no more.... and apparently her desires had zeroed in on something not wholly human.

But then again, what the fuck did that matter in her current reality?

There was the matter that the creature that her attraction was aimed toward was most likely her future murderer, as well. The juxtaposition of so many bewildering things made her angry; it made her want to lash out at something, someone. _Anyone_.

* * *

After they returned to the compound, the human stowed away her items and looted wares into the storage cabinets of his quarters. Vaun could see the tension in her body movements; the way she moved and held herself bespoke of profound agitation.

He knew that he was the cause of it. Reality of their strange companionship had hit her, and the reality of what he would eventually have to do had sunk in.

He knew that he had no choice in it, and she knew it, as well. He knew that she could easily see the cold, hard logistics of his methods. If allowed to change, she would not be the human that she had once been.

But he could hardly begrudge her the bitterness that she obviously felt.

Before he could think much further, a whispered order drifted into his mind, clearing his other thoughts out of the way with its autocracy.

_We wish to feed._

Their collective thoughts seemed blurred with sleep, as if they had just emerged from their black slumber. Vaun knew that they sometimes fed while not even being fully awake, simply rousing just enough from their sleep to be able to drink their sustenance and then return to their clouded inertia.

Perhaps it was something in his bearing or a sound that he made, for as soon as he began to depart, she called out to him. Her voice still held a chill and a deep note of inner upheaval.

“Where are you going?”

He sighed, his exhalation a low growl of fatigue.

“You don’t want to know, Natalie.”

It only took her a fraction of a second to draw the correct conclusion. He turned around to see her rage blossom in a rather spectacular manner. Her eyes flashed with ire and her body tensed even more. Her fists closed at her sides, turning her knuckles white.

“You’re going to feed those… _things_ , aren’t you?”

“Yes,” he replied, the sound of his voice dropping to a dangerously low level.

“People,” she hissed, “You’re going to feed them _people_. What the fuck is wrong with you?”

Before he could reply, she closed the distance between them, her face frozen in a furious sneer.

“You know what,” she spat, “you say that you’re different, that you want to _help_ humans. Then what the hell are you doing? You and your decrepit buddies eat _people_ and keep them like animals, and you _dare_ to say that you are helping us? Fuck you. You’re just like the _strigoi_ in the streets.”

He could tell that she did not realize what had happened until he had her pinned to the nearest storage cabinet, one hand clenching her jaw and the other clamped on her shoulder. In his rage, he was precariously close to simply snapping her neck, but a faint warning from the Old Ones made him desist.

Her gray-green eyes were full of the same defiant anger, but now fear flared in her gaze as well. He was pleased to note that her skin was a shade paler than usual. Her lips were parted slightly and her breath came in short little gasps. He moved a hand to her hair instead, fisting the dark strands in his wrath.

“I am not like them,” he snarled harshly, twisting her hair taut and wrenching her face closer to his own for emphasis. “I am _not_.”

One moment, she was staring at him with eyes full of cold hatred, and the next, her warm scent flooded him with a potent cocktail of confusion, desire, rage, and fear. Her hands suddenly shot up to clutch his pointy ears, yanking him close, and he was so perplexed that the thought of pulling away didn’t even cross his mind.

And then her soft lips crashed onto his with desperate hunger and before he could process what had happened, her slick tongue was touching him and she tasted of vitality and femininity, of blood and sun-warmed flesh. He could not help but to groan into her mouth.

But as soon as his thoughts found him again, he recoiled from her violently, breaking their contact and releasing her. The urge to cover her body with his and take her was so forceful that his sated stinger stirred, adding another demanding voice to the impossible compulsion.

Her lips were bleeding from small cuts caused by his sharp teeth. And her eyes begged him silently not to leave.

Vaun could still taste her.

It took nearly all of his willpower to turn around and flee.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I apologize for the long-ish time it took for me to get this chapter done. School and all that jazz. I do hope that the wait was worth it. But yeah, I know, it's kinda evil to leave it here, isn't it? <3
> 
> As always, please be on the lookout for typos, things that sound completely goofy, etc., as I have no beta. And when it comes to this chapter in particular, I wouldn't be surprised if you find some malarkey in there—I was so tired when I finished it that I was about to plant my face in the keyboard.
> 
> Should you wish to contact me privately, you can do so by email: fleshdust [at] gmail [dot] com. Please don't be pissed if I don't reply right away. Sometimes I can go days without checking my email, and I don't have a smartphone (never will, too antisocial and paranoid). So emails are limited to when I have the time to get on the desktop.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Again, apologies for the time it took me to finish this chapter. School always comes first, but then as I was almost done, I had to go and mess up my right arm. No worries though, it's almost back to normal now. As always, I thank you for your support and above all, I thank you for your patience. Enjoy. <3

In the dim glow of the bare bulbs, Natalie laid on her pallet and stared up into the concrete ceiling above her. The mild-dosage diazepam she had pilfered from the pharmacy was starting to have an effect, and she gratefully welcomed the mellow numbness that started to creep into her body.

Vaun hadn’t returned since their awkward interaction, which was equally disappointing and relieving to her. She let her fingertips brush her lips where they touched the tiny little cuts that his oddly triangular teeth had left her with.

His body had been pressed against hers, the proximity enveloping her in an intoxicating miasma of his ferocious scent. The memory of the unnatural heat of his mouth heated her cheeks. His lips had been strangely stiff and pliant at the same time, like old leather. And his touch had been fire made flesh.

He hadn’t tasted like strawberries. It was a dark, metallic taste, bitter and primal and compelling in its novelty. The stinging pinpricks of his teeth and the taste of her own blood on her tongue had been bizarrely addicting.

Somewhere in another part of the compound, she heard the cries of people. It made her get up and retrieve the diazepam again, shaking out two more of the small, pale blue pills into her palm. Returning to the pallet, she laid down again and wrapped a blanket around her head.

Her breath quickly rendered the fabric warm and heavy-feeling, intensifying the smell of mildew as she breathed it in. She pulled the blanket off her face and resumed staring at the concrete ceiling, following minute cracks and imperfections in the gray composite.

She knew that Vaun was likely one of the ones bringing her fellow humans to the lanky shadows for feeding.

Her anger hadn’t really dissipated. The diazepam had managed to reduce it to a lukewarm smoldering inside of her, but it refused to fade entirely. It was further complicated by her confusion about him and her physical response to his body. And underneath it all there was that tiny wretched thread of mortal fear.

Vaun had looked furious when she had delivered what she knew very well to be a blow below the belt. She regretted it now, naturally, like so many other idiots who did not have a functioning brain-to-mouth filter when they were incensed.

The multiple doses of diazepam that she had taken were starting to forcefully drag her down into a tranquil void that promised forgetfulness. She clung to the recollection of his touch briefly, then allowed herself to be pulled under.

The storage rooms were still empty when she woke up. Lacking a timepiece of any kind, she never knew exactly how long she slept. She listened briefly to her surroundings, and detected no chirps or growls or the faraway cries of dying humans. Her head felt heavy and muddled with pharmaceutical sleep, and even though she had never been much of a coffee-drinker, she wished for some now.

Hell, she’d take cold, burnt, bitter coffee, or even swallow a few spoonfuls of instant coffee granules. The latter had been an effective way to wake up during long nights of studying.

The smell of her body hit her when she tossed the blanket aside and swung her legs over the edge of the pallet. She was still wearing the sweater and pants that she had worn out, sans her _The Thing_ -parka which she had discarded into a corner. She hadn’t showered after her latest fever cycle, and the pungent smell of her body confirmed it.

After relieving herself in the tiny bathroom, she rummaged about in the plastic bin that she had brought from her dorm. She hadn’t grabbed much clothes at all, aside from her favorite pair of trousers. They were a comfortable and well-worn pair of chinos, the beige cloth permanently stained with the dyes that she had used to stain specimen slides—methylene blue and safranin red. A navy blue men’s t-shirt from the cabinet would serve as a shirt.

She paused briefly at the door to the dark corridors outside. Thoughts of shadows and blood flashed through her mind, but she stubbornly pushed them aside, barging into the corridor. The hallways were black as pitch, but she remembered the route and sighed with relief when she saw the faint glow of bare bulbs that emanated from the shower room.

* * *

It was with some reticence that Vaun returned to the storage chambers after he had finished his task.

The Ancients had been fed, and while Vaun hadn’t been especially hungry, he had taken a blood meal as well. His stinger, the vestige of his _strigoi_ counterpart, felt bloated and lazy in his chest. His body felt thoroughly saturated with the rich sustenance of the blood. It was a strange feeling that he did not experience often. He knew that he probably wouldn’t need to feed for at least two weeks, should he not wish it.

It had been difficult to drag one of the humans to the Ancients, and even more so to plunge his stinger into the throat of another, feeling the proboscis pierce a carotid artery with a tiny bursting sensation. Despite the fact that he hadn’t really been hungry, he drank until the human was a gray husk.

If he had been able, he might have wept as he fed.

The Old Ones had scrutinized his mind during their feeding, tugging at the sensations that Natalie had evoked in him with interest. Thankfully, they had made no comments, simply finishing their feeding and retreating into dormancy, their long, slender fingers draped across their chests as they drifted away. The task of disposing of the drained carrion fell to Vaun and a couple of his _strigoi_ -hunters.

They carried the bodies to an aboveground section of the compound that housed an industrial incinerator, capable to rendering flesh and bone into ashes overnight. Vaun stayed there for some time after sending his hunters back, feeling the heat of the incinerator on his skin as the flames slowly decimated the remains of their victims.

Natalie had spoken the truth to him, and it had been far harder to hear than he would have thought, especially since it was her mouth that had spoken the words.

She looked up at him where she sat on the bare concrete floor by one of the storage cabinets, peering into the microscope that she had brought from her dwelling. He saw that the thing had a power cord, and that she had rooted out one of two power outlets present in the chamber. The other chambers that connected to this one had more, but he kept their gridded metal gates padlocked.

She wore an unreadable expression as she regarded him, but after a few moments she inclined her head slightly, offering him a tentative smile.

“Hey,” she said, almost casually, but he could sense that it was just a veneer that she hid behind.

She spoke again before he could reciprocate the greeting. There was an undertone of flustered tension in her voice, and her words flowed a bit faster than usual. Her cheeks seemed a bit flushed, and his eyes automatically went to the small cuts that his teeth had left around her mouth.

Even though she was dying, she had tasted so _alive_.

“Thanks again for taking me to get some of my stuff. You’ve no idea how calming it is to me to ogle into this thing.”

“Is it,” he acknowledged, stepping closer to her.

“Yeah. Want to to take a look?”

Unsure, he approached her and crouched down by her side on the floor, bringing his eyes to the microscope. Peering into the eyepiece, he saw the miniscule world that she had based her education on. The little organisms were lifeless, arrested forever onto the thin glass slide.

The shape of the parasites on the slide made him think of miniscule serpents adorned with a transparent, wavy membrane along the length of their curved, slender bodies. Though still and motionless, they still seemed strangely dynamic, their purple color somehow unnatural-looking.

“Can you see?” Natalie asked him then and leaned closer to him, having previously scooched over the give him some room to examine the specimen.

He could hear a note of excitement in her voice. It made something inside of him quiver slightly.

“Yes,” he replied. “I didn’t know that they could be this colorful.”

“Oh, they’re not. They’re dyed to aid visibility.”

“I see,” he replied, straightening to look at her. “What are they?”

“ _Trypanosoma cruzi_. These are trypomastigotes; the infective stage.”

She proceeded to switch slides then, showing him a few other specimens. She exchanged the small glass slides with a practiced hand, her movements fluid as she slipped slides of _Cyclosporidium, Giardia,_ and _Babesia_ onto the mechanical stage of the microscope.

He found that he enjoyed her proximity once more, even though they were not even touching. Her female scent was pleasant and he could tell that she had washed her body. Even the faint smell of the parasites within her was less disagreeable.

“This is _Plasmodium,_ ” she announced after changing slides again, inviting him to peer into the machine.

He did so, seeing a lone specimen of the organism that was plaguing her bloodstream even as they spoke. Such a small thing it was, even compared to the blood worms, but fatal nonetheless. Its contours approximated that of a circlet, with a small, round dot skirting the edge of its ringed shape.

“This is its trophozoite stage,” she told him. “It’s also called the ‘ring form’. It’s an immature form of _Plasmodium falciparum_ inside of red blood cells. It then matures into a schizont, eventually filling the entire cell with its offspring. The cell eventually bursts, and the offspring go on to infect other red blood cells.”

The palpable tension in her voice had risen, causing him to look up at her. Her shoulders were bunched and her hands were in her lap where she sat cross-legged. Her fingers were intertwined tightly and her knuckles had turned white.

“Natalie…”

“ _Plasmodium_ has more stages than that,” she continued, ignoring him. “It’s a complex parasite. Other stages in humans are merozoites… gametocytes. It takes different forms in the mosquitoes that carry it, too. Oocysts. Exflagellated microgametocytes… that’s a stage that isn’t seen in humans…”

“Natalie, stop,” he said, pushing the microscope away.

After only a moment of hesitation, he reached for her hands and gently separated them where they were wringing in her lap. She flinched at the contact and let out a breath through gritted teeth.

“Yeah,” she mumbled, slowly disengaging her hands from his grasp.

Getting up, she went to the power outlet to which her machine was connected and yanked on the cord. The light in the microscope winked out.

She cleared her throat. “Vaun, I… what I said before... it was a really shitty cheap shot. _Really_ shitty. I’m sorry.”

He noticed how carefully she avoided speaking of their _other_ interaction that had occurred after she had spoken the words to him. It had truly affected him more than he wanted to admit.

But the sensation of her soft body pressed against his, the feel of her fingers clutching his ears and the taste of her mouth had affected him more.

He watched her silently as she crouched and gathered up the cord to the microscope, coiling it and then procuring a small, plastic hair clip from her pocket. She clasped the colorful clip onto a section of the coil so that it would not unravel.

“You were not wrong,” he told her then. “We _do_ sustain ourselves with human blood. But we want to preserve the human species, as well.”

He had often thought of the dystopia that the Master considered to be anything but. A world devoid of the human population, except for breeding pairs that could bring forth the next generation of blood supply. Ruined landscapes crawling with hordes of beings that could not exercise individual thought in any form, only blindly adhere to the upper echelon of their ilk and left to their own mindless devices when not of use to their masters.

It made him think of something another Born had once told him about the societies of old. The ancient Greeks had named such individuals _archon_ ; an exclusive elite that possessed absolute power over their subjects, bending law and land and its population to fit their own needs and whims.

The crucial difference in humans was that most of them had since cast off the shackles of such an oppressive regime, refusing to submit silently to their own subjugation. While Vaun knew that a few similarly dictatorial societies existed in the current world, he also knew that they would fall eventually, as well.

It had happened countless times through the annals of human history; time and time again did a new despotic entity rise, and time and time again, it fell. The very nature of the humans would eventually revolt against such a regime, which was what made their species so singular.

In comparison, _strigoi_ were not capable to form even the slightest thought of dissent in the scummy voids that had once been human minds. They were simply mobile tools for the _strigoi_ gentry, those that the Master had granted the gift of individual thought.

The endowment of free thought technically elevated them from mindless predators to the level of the humans that they so desperately wanted to enslave. The morbid irony of it all was not lost on Vaun.

In one fluid movement, he picked himself up off the floor where they both had been sitting.

“Believe me when I say that we want to safeguard your kind, Natalie. The _strigoi_ that we fight against… their plans… it would be an unnatural thing. Species in this world co-exist, many of them having mutually beneficial relationships. We must strive for the same. Balance _must_ be maintained.”

She nodded, getting up with the microscope in her arms. Walking over to the storage cabinets, she placed the machine inside. She turned around after closing the doors to the cabinet, leaning back into it and clasping her hands on the cabinet handles behind her back.

“Symbiosis,” she muttered, her gaze distant. “I remember the bio-textbook definition verbatim. _‘The living together of unlike organisms’_. Defined in the late eighteen hundreds by Heinrich Anton de Bary.”

She tilted her head, giving him a small, lopsided grin.

“Things were so much simpler back when all I had to do was memorize useless facts for exams.”

* * *

Her half- _strigoi_ companion simply nodded at that, after which an awkward silence stretched out between them. Natalie avoided his red-and-black gaze as he scrutinized her in a way that made her both uncomfortable and intrigued.

His body had been so _warm_. His scent had enveloped her, predatory and primal, promising pain and pleasure to blot out the pathetic loneliness and fear that haunted her.

She knew that she had felt him respond to her touch before he pulled away.

 _You’ve lost your marbles, you know,_ some voice inside of her cackled. _The cheese done slid off the cracker,_ it added with a mock-Southern drawl.

 _Does it matter?_ she countered. _Does it really matter what I choose to do with my last days on this fucking Earth?_

The cackler had no response to that, falling into a sullen silence.

_There, good. Now keep your goddamn mouth shut._

She righted herself, crouching down by the outlet where her microscope had been plugged in. The slides lay scattered in a haphazard pile next to the worn shoebox in which she kept them. Sitting down, she started to sort them like she had so many times before.

_Alphabetical. Acanthamoeba…. Babesia, Cyclosporidium, Giardia…_

She paused as she separated a space between _Naegleria fowleri_ and _Toxoplasma gondii_. Setting her unsorted slides aside, she fished out the slide that had caught her attention. The label was printed in her own compulsive hand, and it read: **Necator americanus (male)**.

The little hookworm specimen was one of the few non-protozoan organisms that she had in her little collection. She remembered where she had gotten this one. James, the lab manager of the biology laboratory at the university had given it to her.

They had developed a friendly rapport since she inevitably had to spend a lot of her time in the lab. She would often stay to help him after hours. Together they would sterilize used slides, prepare batches of amber-colored agar, clean microscopes with Kimwipes and scrub test tubes and Erlenmeyer flasks and graduated cylinders.

Their acquaintance had been a strictly platonic one and could never have evolved beyond just that, since James preferred the romantic company of men. That had suited Nat just fine; he was ridiculously good-looking, but she never felt any sexual attraction towards him. They both simply had an affinity for parasites and got along very well. While her interest in parasitic organisms was concentrated on unicellular protozoans, James was more fond of multicellular worms and flukes—helminths, nematodes; trematodes.

Many nights after finishing at the lab, they would go to a greasy spoon diner near the university and talk of things over dinner that probably made any patron within earshot lose their appetite.

He had given her a helminth specimen once when the lab received a shipment from a veterinarian who would at times donate extracted specimens to the university. Having an excess of male _N. americanus_ , James had given her one after mounting the worm on its glass slide.

She hoped that James was alive—it would be a sick coincidence, much like her own, if he had been infected with the blood worms that were most likely similar to the helminths that he was so fond of.

But James wouldn’t have another organism that was in the process of killing him while fighting for dominance with the worms of the _strigoi_ , allowing him to teeter on the brink of death while feeling deceptively well. He would turn within a day.

She studied the tiny male hookworm. It was large enough to see with the naked eye, but still not as large as the females—the males ranged from around seven to nine millimeters, while the females would be a few millimeters larger.

A rustle of heavy fabrics and the slight creak of wood told her that Vaun had seated himself on the crate that he usually rested on.

She sorted the rest of the slides into their shoebox, thoughtfully slipping the _N. americanus_ slide into its alphabetically proper place. After gingerly placing the shoe box into one of the cabinets, she approached him.

His red-and-black eyes hadn’t left her. The expression that he wore was as unreadable as ever; the strange not-smile that stretched across the lower part of his face neutrally horizontal.

“Hey, you know the medical kit you patched me up with after you, uh… bit me?”

“Yes?”

The vibrating subvocals of his voice seemed deeper somehow.

“Does it contain a scalpel? And forceps… or tweezers?”

There was a miniscule twitch in his eyes at that.

“I believe so. Why?”

“Vaun, I have to see one. One of the worms inside of me.”

“Natalie, I don’t think it’s a good idea,” he answered. “I will not sit here and watch you mutilate yourself. Do you know how to even locate one?”

That did grate on her a little, that one simple question. She didn’t know how to find one. She had no idea if they could be found in the small subdermal veins that carried little risk of bleeding out if cut, or if they populated larger arteries. Cutting into one of those would cause her to bleed out within minutes. She had no idea if they were intramuscular or even if they dwelled in viscera, as well.

And for all of her post-grad studies, the was not trained in surgery. She was not a medical student. She could draw blood, cerebrospinal fluid, and other bodily fluids that could host parasites. She could take one look at the brain tissue of a dead body and identify what amoeba attacked it. But she was not qualified to perform autopsies or to surgically extract specimens.

“I don’t,” she admitted, but then a small recollection sparked in her. “But you told me once that you can sense them, or smell them; I don’t remember which. You can find one, and cut it out.”

“You want me to…” he started, but she cut him off.

“Please, Vaun. I have to see it. Please. Stitch me up afterwards, I know that there’s catgut thread and suturing needles in the kit.”

He sat silent, regarding her with an expression that had changed slightly into one that she could only interpret as consternation.

“You can find it faster than I can,” she said, and it was true. “I have to see one. I _have_ to. Please understand.”

Long moments crawled by and he finally nodded once. His nod was short and circumspect, but it was a nod all the same.

“Lie down on the mattress, on your stomach,” he instructed her and went to retrieve the styrofoam cooler that served as the in-house medical kit.

He knelt at her side with scalpel in hand, his heated fingers pulling the back of her shirt up to her shoulders. She closed her eyes tightly when she felt the cool touch of the blade. The chill of the steel was such a startling contrast to the heat of his flesh.

* * *

Her deep groans of pain and strangled curses nearly made Vaun stop when he first sliced into her pale skin with the scalpel, but Natalie hissed at him with a thick voice to continue and get it over with. The cut was no more than two inches, and he had swiftly applied it between her shoulder blades where he knew that no major blood vessels were located.

He straddled the small of her back to inspect the incision that glared at him like a weeping red eye on her scarred skin. Leaning down, he focused his senses in order to be able to detect the movements of the worms that had once, so long ago, inadvertently made him what he was.

As soon as he sensed one near the wound, he plunged the forceps into the cut, causing fresh trickles of blood to well out of the red, glistening meat. He was glad that he didn’t have any desire at all to feed.

Natalie’s body arched under him, the violent movement an instinctive response to the invasive pain. He growled out a choked apology as he pushed her shoulders back down with his free hand.

He felt the tiny jaws of the instrument clamp onto the squirming creature. Slowly, carefully, he started to pull it out of her flesh, doing his best to shut out her pained moans.

And then finally, he held the writhing worm in the stainless steel grasp of the forceps, its pale body flecked with her blood. He deposited it into a jar that she had insisted that he use for the purpose and swiftly closed the wound on her back with slapdash catgut stitches, wincing each time when she let out noises of discomfort.

After cleaning and bandaging the cut, he climbed off her, washed his hands in the small bathroom, and sank down on the crate opposite the pallet. Natalie stayed in her face-down position for a few moments, panting heavily into the musty blankets from the exertion of enduring the pain.

Sitting up, she shrugged her shirt down again and wordlessly held her hand out to him.

He handed her the jar and watched her as she studied the blood worm. He could see a marked difference in the movements of the worm, having seen more than enough of its kind in his time.

Its movements were not as animated as usual; it seemed sluggish and scrawny in comparison to the thousands of others that he had seen. He could only conclude that sharing its host with another parasite resulted in weaker organisms.

She turned the jar in her hands, holding it at eye level and studying the pallid thing that he had extracted from her flesh. After some time, she placed the jar on the floor between them.

“Thank you,” she murmured softly. “I needed to see it.”

“It doesn’t look normal,” he commented, leaning down to pick up the jar. “It seems to be malnourished and weak.”

She nodded at that and remained silent for a few moments as she experimentally, but carefully rolled her shoulders to gauge the ache of the fresh cut between them. She grimaced slightly when the wound seemingly made itself known.

“Do you have them, too?” she asked.

“No. Born do not have the blood worms.”

“Lucky you,” she said with a grim smile fluttering across her lips. “I don’t feel better after seeing it,” she added.

“I didn’t imagine that you would.”

“Mmm. Should have figured that one out by myself, but I’m stubborn.”

He rose then, intent on taking the tiny cursed thing into the hallway and stomping the un-life out of it. But she reached for the jar, snatching it out of his grasp and placing it back on the floor. He made a small chirruping noise of confusion, but when her white arms went around his neck and her soft mouth sought his, the sound turned into a deep rumble of violent need.

He had not one inkling what prompted her to do this again, but this time when he tasted her mouth, he promised himself that what she begun, he would finish.

He found that one of his hands had buried itself into her dark hair, clamping on the back of her neck. His other hand was splayed across the small of her back, pulling her hips into his own and forcing her body to mold tightly against him.

She moaned into his mouth, the sound laden with fear and desire. He felt a trickle of her blood on his tongue when his teeth pricked her lips once again, but all he could taste was her, _her_ , and not the taint of the parasites.

He would not resist, he _could_ not resist this time. The feral thing within him that was both human and _strigoi_ , a ruthless predator of lust and hunger and want, demanded that he take her, lose himself in her flesh; drown himself in her scent of life and death and blood and sun. His sated stinger stirred, churning with a bizarre type of interest that had nothing to do with blood-hunger.

He pulled away from her only to shove her into the nearest wall with a savage snarl, pressing his body into hers again. Her eyes were wide and dark now and her skin was flushed. Her chest rose and fell rapidly as if she was panicking, and maybe she was, but she welcomed him back into her embrace again, even when he ground his hips against hers so hard that he was sure that he would bruise her pale flesh. But the human warmth and female scent that radiated from between her thighs did not allow him to dwell on such things for any amount of time.

He would have her. He _had_ to. There was no other choice.

* * *

A thousand things swirled in Natalie’s mind when Vaun descended upon her again, his body crashing into hers with punishing force. She didn’t even really know why she had done this again. The need for proximity within her was too great, and so was the craving for pleasure and joy in the untold days that she had left. There was plenty of fear, screaming for her to run, to get away from the creature that fed on humans; the creature that would one day kill her.

She couldn’t. She didn’t even want to try.

The anticipation and the dark pleasure of his violent touch chased away the constant feeling of death and disease that plagued her, his rough hands and sharp teeth reminding her that she was still alive and not dead, not _strigoi_ , but a living human.

She fed all of her anger, fear and bewilderment into their desperate embrace, and between them it all transmuted into a dangerous, animal-like sensation of want.

Vaun grabbed her wrists and yanked them above her head, and all she could think of was him and how much she wanted him, wanted him to take her, make her feel alive and make her feel again. This predatory creature with eyes of coal and blood, this human-but-not-human male that was more male than any other she had encountered, the creature that would one day execute her but right here, right now, he made her feel alive.

And at least, when the time came, she would have this.

She cried out when he lowered his head to the crook of her neck with a thrumming purr, his teeth sinking into her flesh where her neck and shoulder connected. When he faced her again, she claimed his mouth once more and bit down as ruthlessly as he had, feeling his heat, the leathery lips; his fingers creating a tight grasp of fire around her wrists.

When he released her hands, she grasped his ears and pulled him into her again, hiking her right leg onto his narrow hip, wishing that all of his black paramilitary gear would just crumble away into nothingness so that his flesh could burn her into ashes.

It was a tiny noise, barely audible, that caught her attention. It reached her through Vaun’s vicious grunts, even through her own wanting gasps as one of his hands traveled underneath her shirt and his teeth gnawed at her throat again. She opened her eyes and turned her head slightly to peer at the doorway that led to the hallways.

A dark, hooded figure stood on the far side of the room, its silhouette darkened and motionless as it watched them.

“Vaun,” she managed, her voice thick and breathless. “Vaun!”

She managed to tug hard enough on his pointed ears to gain his attention.

An impatient, perilous growl came from him before he sensed the urgency of her tone. His eyes were dark with carnal ferocity when he righted himself to look at her, and there was a warning there, as well, one that said that he _would_ have her.

Natalie shook her head to indicate that this was not of her own choosing, jerking her chin over his shoulder toward the dark intruder. He understood her meaning immediately as he disengaged from her, turning around swiftly to face the figure.

A few seconds ticked by before the intruder spoke.

“Vaun. Brother.”

Vaun’s threatening stance lessened right away, though she could see that the tension in his shoulders did not. His voice was tight with the vexation of being interrupted, but a note of deep respect and affection was there, as well.

“Hello, Quinlan.”

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Quinlan. What a cockblocker.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yeah, so sorry about my tardiness with this chapter. I was exhausted after fall semester, and have generally been in a state of don't-wanna-do-shit since then. I hope that you're still with me, and that you forgive me for being late with an update. But never worry, I do not abandon stories unless I freaking die, or something. Why? I am a completionist and a compulsive one at that, which means that I cannot, for the life of me, abandon a project that I've started, lol. I guess that's a good thing when it comes to writing.
> 
> Again, I want to thank you all for your comments and support. I appreciate it so much, you have no idea. I usually write for fandoms and/or pairings that are fairly obscure, so I don't get a lot of kudos/comments/hits on my stories as a whole. So it's such a lovely surprise every time I receive one here. However, please note that this is not a plug in order to get you to go and read my other stories. Actually, unless you're into _really_ dark stuff, please don't. =D

 

 

“A human woman,” his brother-in-arms murmured, almost to himself, as they inspected the pack of dormant _strigoi_ that served as Vaun’s squad of incognizant hunters.

Vaun watched him impassively, grateful that the sheer physical discomfort of being interrupted by his comrade had faded a bit now.

He had been more than ready to lift Natalie by that white throat that glistened with the red marks of his teeth and claim her with a dark violence born out of decades of suppression. He realized now that it might have been a fortunate thing that Quinlan had yanked him out of it with his ill-timed arrival, even though his body had painfully howled at the interruption.

The _strigoi_ -pack was huddled together tightly in another wing of the compound, a rumbling mass of black-clad bodies without minds of their own. The air was acrid with the scent of ammonia. He watched as Quinlan’s pale fingers softly skated across the temples and foreheads of the catatonic creatures, automatically searching for indications of the Master’s influence.

Their Ancient dignitaries were powerful in this regard, but after all, the Master was their kin. And in the dormancy of the Old Ones, a tendril of insidious commands could sometimes trickle past the wall of their cerebral control.

It had always been his comrade’s custom during these inspections, this strange touching; a peculiar type of eulogy to the humans that the hunters had once been. Vaun knew that neither of them needed to touch them in order to discern if their barren minds had been breached, but Quinlan had always done so.

His comrade stroked along the brow one hunter, and Vaun sensed the command as it bled through the _strigoi’s_ hibernation. It twitched slightly and opened its eyes, a muffled growl emerging from behind the cowl that covered its mouth. However, it disentangled from its packmates all the same and got on its feet, swaying slightly.

“This one,” Quinlan said quietly. “It’s compromised.”

Vaun concentrated on the dead void that was its mind, sifting through the mist of the Ancient’s prerogatives to find a minute, scummy nebula of the Master there, attempting to seize control. He had inspected the pack himself two days ago and the breach had not existed at that time. It must have been compromised only very recently.

“Yes,” he agreed, leading the docile hunter into the corridor outside.

Once they arrived at the incinerator, it did not take him long to slowly but firmly slide his blade into the back of its neck with a practiced hand.

They stood together and listened to the roar of the flames as the body burned. The flames licked at the carrion and and catched; intent on decimating the empty vessel of the _strigoi_ into sterile cinders. The bodies of _strigoi_ burned twice as fast as those of humans. Their flesh had turned dry; almost cured, like a smoked side of animal flesh that some humans ate.

“A human woman,” Quinlan stated again as they stood there.

His voice was, as always, deep and tinged with the characteristic growl of his proboscis. To the untrained ear this comrade’s voice sounded neutral, but Vaun had always heard the muted timbre of an ancient type of melancholy within in.

“Yes,” he replied.

They both remained silent and unmoving for some time. Tiny hissing sounds could be heard within the violence of the flames as the first few bloodworms that had been unfortunate enough to dwell directly beneath the skin were exposed to the heat.

“I have been able to detect some of your communications with the Ancients on the matter,” Quinlan continued. “I know that she is infected.”

“She is.”

“And the secondary parasite that she carries has prevented the _strigoi_ metamorphosis. The Old Ones finds it very interesting, as you can imagine.”

“Yes, her condition is intriguing.” Vaun turned to face his half-breed comrade. “I’ve been charged with… keeping her.”

“So you have. But it seems that it has gone beyond that.”

Vaun could not help but emit an irritated hiss at that, but it was mostly aimed at himself.

“Brother,” Quinan said, putting his hand on Vaun’s shoulder. “We are cursed with the blood-hunger of the _strigoi_ , but we also harbor human urges… emotions. Desire is one of them. I’ve been fortunate enough to know love and desire… however briefly.”

He grunted in response.

“You’ve known the pleasures of female flesh.”

It was not a question, but a statement, even though Vaun hadn’t shared his precious few experiences on the matter with anyone.

“I know that it did not end well,” Quinlan continued silently, his voice resonant with understanding. “Who were they?”

“Doxies. Some will bed even creatures like us for the right amount of coin. I lost control.”

A mournful noise emerged from his chest before he could stop it, rumbling past his stinger before it was at least partly arrested by his clenched teeth. It was true that he had not had any profound feelings toward the couple of women that he had paid other than a basic, male need for release that at times seemed stronger even than the need for blood.

He had killed them in his passion. After the first one, he had swore to never lose control again. And yet he had done so a second time. After that, he had stubbornly suppressed any male urges that would assail him. After some time, the urges faded into nearly nothing, but they were always there in the background, just like the blood-hunger, and far harder to satisfy.

He mourned these women deeply, even after so many years after their bones had turned to dust in the unmarked graves of the poor. No one remembered these penniless women, these faceless whores that had sold their bedraggled bodies for a few coins decades ago.

While he did not remember their names, being fairly sure that they hadn’t even told him, he remembered every line etched in their faces, every curve of their worn, yet alluring bodies. He would always remember them.

He mourned what they had been, the humans that they had been and the perfectly singular lives that he had extinguished because he hadn’t been able to control himself. They had been scarred and aged, but nevertheless beautiful and unique. The scent of their female bodies had been intoxicating and comforting at the same time.

Even though he hadn’t made the conscious connection at the time, he recognized the contrast between them and in the fetid decay of the female body that he had once crawled out of; fundamentally aware of his perverse birth out of a dead womb that had been both his cradle and his grave.

In spite of the parasites that polluted her blood, Natalie’s scent was equally alluring. He wondered if his interest in her was due to the fact that she was the first human female in decades that he had been forced to be around for extended periods of time. He quickly decided that it didn’t matter. Just like her reasons for seemingly returning his interest did not matter.

She had not struggled when he sank his teeth into her flesh. Her cry had been one of pain, but he had felt a fundamental vibration of pleasure in her voice as it thrummed through his teeth and into his skull. Her fingers had curled tighter around his ears and he had felt the pounding of her infected blood as it rushed hotly to her lower regions.

“You honor their humanity by remembering them,” Quinlan said then, interrupting his thoughts. “I honor the humanity of the one I… loved… every day.”

Vaun knew of the human woman that had been his comrade’s wife long before he himself was cursed into existence. And he knew that the woman and her child had died by the Master’s hand, yet Quinlan still loved them. Something bloomed within him when he thought of having Natalie at his side in the same manner, but he did not know enough of such matters to label it one way or another.

Instead, he categorized it as sensations that he was familiar with. Respect and the same type of _esprit de corps_ that he felt for his allies, human or half-breed. Confusion and questions without answers. Dark desire and lust and hunger.

Regret and a terrible sensation of grief, knowing that he would kill her.

He decided to change the subject completely as they left the incinerator chamber. He knew that Quinlan noticed his ponderous attempt to steer the subject into a more comfortable direction, but thankfully, he said nothing.

“Any word from the others?”

There were only two other half-breeds that he knew of in the world, besides himself and his pale-eyed brother. He could sometimes sense them across the oceans that separated them, but he often left that detail of communication to Quinlan, who had developed far keener senses in his thousands of years. They all worked to reach the same goal, united in their opposition of the Master and his goals of gruesome imbalance between humans and _strigoi_.

“Hakim is still active,” Quinlan responded. “He has roused an old squad of _strigoi_ that have been under his control for a millennia.”

Hakim had been Born in the area that was currently known as the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Between stretches of hibernation, he would rise when needed, commanding several squadrons of strigoi that roused with him.

Vaun had met him only twice, remembering his eyes that lacked even the type of black pinprick pupils that Quinlan’s had, instead looking much like eyes completely plagued by silvery cataracts. What he remembered most, though, was that while Hakim was hairless and pale as himself, he had still been able to discern a faint olive tint to his skin that bespoke of the human that should have been. He had found himself with a sensation of bizarre envy at that.

“He was always gifted at controlling their minds,” Vaun recalled. “If I didn’t know better, I would have taken him for an Old One.”

“He is old, but not Ancient,” his comrade said. “With time and training, we can acquire these skills.”

Vaun had always been more partial to simply taking his orders from the Ancients, hunting down any crops of _strigoi_ that had flared up here and there over the years. Physical action gave him a sensation of satisfaction and revenge, and while he had little trouble with rudimentary mental control and communication, he was happy to leave the finer points of cerebral meddling to others.

“Lacroix has fallen,” Quinlan stated then with a low, heavy voice.

Vaun had never met the Born known as Lacroix, but knew that she had been mostly active in France and its surrounding countries. While she had been young, only just Born at the beginning of the twentieth century, she had proved very useful during the reign of the German Third Reich.

She had been tasked with hunting a _Schutzstaffel_ -officer known as Eichorst. The human had, at the time, been one of the Master’s lickspittles and a precious human cog in the German war machine, which worked in the Master’s favor by providing cover, comfort and an endless flow of blood from prisoners that were to be buried in mass graves. Eichorst had eventually been corrupted and turned, and granted individual thought as the Master’s right hand.

The Master had been able to sense Lacroix approaching, leading her to fail in her primary task. However, she had been able to track and exterminate a large enclave of dormant _strigoi_ that had been hidden away in a German cave system named _Hermannshöhle_. Vaun had been able to sense the Master’s reverberating rage when the pack burned. It still pleased him to think about it.

Lacroix, for her part, had gone into hibernation after that.

“What happened?”

“That miscreant, Eichorst, has a long memory. He managed to find the place of her dormancy. He dispatched human hunters to slay her in her hibernation. They succeeded.”

Vaun gave a curt nod as they turned the corner into the corridor that would lead them back to the storage chambers. Before they reached them, Quinlan indicated for him to stop.

“We’ve tracked down a couple of the survivors of flight seven-five-three,” Quinlan told him. “I need you to bring a handful of hunters and deal with the ones that you can find. The closest target is a woman by the name of Joan Luss. She lives in Bronxville; her home is a good place to start. You know what to do.”

Nodding again, Vaun simply placed his hand on his comrade’s shoulder briefly before they both continued toward the storage chambers.

* * *

Natalie had cleaned and bandaged the bite marks that Vaun had given her and was just finishing off a can of fruit cocktail when the two half-breeds entered, causing her to stop fishing in the can for that last bit of cherry that was floating in the syrup, slippery and evasive like a little maraschino jellyfish. The two dark shapes simply stood there, staring at her, ludicrous in their complete lack of social decorum.

Nat sighed and went to the small bathroom, pointedly ignoring yet another chill that skittered up her spine like an icy insect. She washed the sticky syrup off her hands, and seated herself cross-legged on her pallet, facing the half-breeds.

“Do I have something on my face?” she asked, trying to bring some levity to ease the awkwardness of the whole thing.

Vaun motioned to the dark figure at his side. A hood obscured most of the head of the newcomer, but she could see pale eyes silently regarding her. A ridiculous sword was strapped across his back, its yellowed bone handle peeking from behind a black-clad shoulder.

_A femur,_ she thought, somehow unsurprised. _Well, at least things can’t get much weirder._

“Natalie, this is Quinlan. A comrade.”

“Hey there.” She lifted one of her hands from her lap and gave him a small half-wave.

Quinan inclined his head at her, the black pinpricks amidst the arctic blue of his eyes never leaving her.

“Hello,” he said finally.

“Well, _that_ wasn't awkward at all,” Natalie quipped, ignoring yet another chill that traversed her body. She knew very well what the chills meant.

“She smells strange,” Quinlan commented.

“Beg your pardon,” she replied, looking up when Vaun approached her and held his hand out.

She took it and allowed him to pull her up from her sitting position. Ignoring that his comrade was right there, Vaun pulled her into the unnatural heat of his body. A surge of anxious lust swelled in her again when she felt him nuzzle her neck, inhaling deeply. When he withdrew, she saw a flash of concern flash across the impassive visage of his face.

“It’s happening again,” he mumbled as he straightened, his hands on her upper arms.

He put some distance between them then, but did not release her.

Natalie clenched her jaws and looked down, avoiding his red-and-black eyes.

“Yeah, I know. I have the chills that come before the fever.”

“Why didn’t you say anything?”

“They only just started,” she told him, meeting his gaze. There was a note of irritation in her voice and face, she knew. “Besides, last time I got sick, you knew it before I did. So don’t give me that shit.”

She was strangely pleased to note that his only response to that was a slightly startled blink. Nevertheless, she swallowed her irritation and leaned into him instead, sighing tremulously when he responded and held her. He did so in his usual manner, slightly stiffly and not a little awkwardly, as if he simply was not used to being in close contact with another creature.

It made her think of the guy that she had lost her virginity to. It had all been an universally cliché business with fumbling hands and nervous giggles on prom night, in the backseat of her car.

And yet, Vaun had not displayed the same type of hesitancy when they had shared their little frenetic interlude before being interrupted. His manner had been dark, primal; animalistic. His touch had been rough and greedy, and the memory of it caused a small shudder in her that had nothing to do with her fever chills.

_Quinlan_ , she thought to herself, _you must have a Ph.D in shitty timing._

A few more minutes, and Vaun would have had her. And she would have given herself to him, savoring the sharp, deep pain of his teeth and the feel of him inside of her.

“Natalie,” Vaun said, breaking her reverie and withdrawing from her. “I must go. There’s something that… requires my attention.”

“All right,” she said, gritting her teeth against the whine that wanted to emerge from her throat.

And then the fear was there again. The fear of death; the fear of being alone. It swelled blackly in her, terrible in its vast emptiness.

Vaun turned to his comrade.

“Quinlan. She is about to enter a cycle of illness caused by the other parasite. Will you look after her until I return?”

The one called Quinlan remained infuriatingly impassive, simply inclining his head. Tuning away from the odd pair, Natalie went to the storage cabinets, opening one and fishing out an amber-colored bottle.

Trying to refuse to think about the possible outcomes of overdosing on anti-inflammatories, she swallowed two of the eight-hundred milligram pills. They left a dry trail of the characteristic bitterness of medicine in her throat.

“I shall,” Quinlan said behind her.

She turned, an opened can of soda in her hand to wash out the medicinal taste in her mouth. She drank until the taste transformed into a slimy film of sugar instead, crumpling the empty can and tossing it into a bucket that she had designated as a waste basket.

“Terrific,” she said, wincing at the bitchy sarcasm in her voice. “Sorry. I know that I might need help once the fever sets in. Thank you…”

She had intended to say his name, but for a moment her brain drew a blank, reverting back to a literature class she had attended in high school. The professor had assigned _Moby Dick_ , hailing Herman Melville as one of the great writers of the American Renaissance.

Literature had always bored her and at present, she probably wouldn’t have been able to tell the American Renaissance from Thomas the Tank Engine. She had managed the A that she stubbornly strove for in the class, but had promptly forgot all about it until, absurdly enough, her brain decided that this was the perfect moment to recall it.

And now, all she could think of was the name of one of the characters from the blasted thing.

_Queequeg. Queequeg. Queequeg._

“Thank you…”

_Queequeg!_

“Quinlan,” Vaun’s icy-eyed comrade supplied with a quirk of his elongated lips that made her feel a little bit better. She relaxed visibly, returning his grin.

“Thank you, Quinlan.”

Vaun approached her again, and she felt his burning fingers at her throat. He cradled her jaw surprisingly gently, pressing his forehead to hers. She brought a hand to his pallid face in response, thumbing the corner of his strange mouth while drawing comfort from the earthy smell of him.

“I’ll be back as soon as I can,” he told her before he retreated, striding over to one of the locked gridded gates with keys in hand.

* * *

The creature named Quinlan surprised a little after Vaun had left. The silence between them had reached almost unbearable levels until he nodded toward a deck of cards that was haphazardly piled on the table nearby. She noticed that his voice had the same type of dual harmonics that she heard in Vaun.

“Do you play, Natalie?”

“Er,” she managed, leaving the cuticle that she had been worrying with her teeth.

It was probably just as well. She wasn’t sure that it was a great idea right now, to bite her cuticles until she drew blood. The compulsion was strong, but she ignored it.

“Poker?” Quinlan asked her, retrieving the cards and shuffling them with the fluidity of a goddamn croupier.

“Please, no,” she said, laughing a little. It made her think of Hank. “A former roommate of mine was far too obsessed with poker. Watched it all the time.”

When smoked out on his kush, Hank had been obsessed with the poker games on TV, commandeering the remote to stare stupidly at the screen with his mouth hanging open in some sort of intoxicated amazement. When he wasn’t stuffing it with chips or pretzels or peanut butter cups.

The few times that she had the time to partake of his stash, she had still not been able to discern the fascination with the game.

“Gin, then?”

“Sure,” Natalie replied, thankful to be rid of some of the tension in the air.

They sat down on the floor, facing each other, and played a few hundred-point rounds until Quinlan had effectively kicked her ass with a pack of cards.

She groaned and rolled her eyes as he placed another excellent hand in front of her.

“Gin,” he smirked at her.

“That’s it, I’m done!”

He laughed; a low, pleasant sound.

“Not fair, you know,” she continued. “You’ve probably played this for three hundred years.”

“The game was only been around for a century or so,” he replied.

“A _century_ then. Still. That’s a lot of practice.”

The chills were starting to become invasive now, and she knew that if this _Plasmodium_ cycle followed its erstwhile cousin, the chills would soon translate into fever. The cycles seemed to keep true to the disease, even though technically, she should have died from her malaria a couple of times over by now. It was as relieving as it was disconcerting.

She got up from the floor and retrieved a blanket, sitting down on her pallet while Quinlan stacked the cards into a neat pile.

“You are feeling worse, aren’t you?” he asked her then.

“Yeah. I’ll have a fever soon. The anti-inflammatories might help. But it’s coming.”

“I know,” Quinlan responded quietly. “I can smell the parasite. It’s multiplying rapidly.”

Natalie said nothing to that, only pulled the blanket tighter around herself as the chills intensified, grazing her skin with cold, bony fingers.

“How did you acquire it?”

Teeth starting to chatter, she recounted her trip to Zimbabwe, the desired work-study credits, how the _Plasmodium_ -study of a population in a certain area would look great on her transcripts. She finished her account with the bizarre irony of being infected by a bite of the mosquito that carried the parasite.

“The stupid thing is,” she added, “is that I could have _prevented_ it. One night of forgetting to apply DEET. _One_ fucking night.”

“DEET?”

“Insect repellant.”

“Ah,” Quinlan nodded. “I’ve sensed some of the interchange between Vaun and the Ancients when it comes to you and your condition. I know that there is a cure for your… malaria. But should you be cured of it, the worms will take over. And you will… _become_.”

“Yeah.”

She had thought of those outcomes enough by now that she had become numb to their respective realities. Instead, she decided to probe him about the whole aspect of _strigoi_. It was an entire otherworld that she had no experience of; a world that had long eluded hard science.

_Hey,_ she thought as they conversed, _I’ve got a walking, talking Nobel prize in front of me._

She wondered if there even was such a thing anymore as Nobel prizes. For all she knew, the whole world had gone to hell.

Quinlan was careful in his answers when she asked him about the Ancients, the strange lines of cerebral communication between them, and the biology of _strigoi_. She learned many things that she had thought impossible in her old life. Predictably, she paused when Quinlan described the bodies of _strigoi_ and their lack of sexual organs.

_Of course, you’d zoom in on that. How very Freudian of you._

“So, ah…” she began, unsure of how to formulate her question.

It was ridiculous. She was a scientist; it was not a line of inquiry that should embarrass her. She couldn’t even remember how many genital swabs of both sexes that she had examined for evidence of a sexually transmitted parasite of the _Trichomonas_ genus. Hell, she had even been allowed to once examine the genital lesions of a gentleman infected with syphilis.

Syphilis was a bacterial infection, and thus not her field of study, but infection in the Western world was so rare that it was a morbid treat to behold an infection site with its characteristic lesion. A medical resident whom she had known from her microbiology class had called her out of the blue, excited in the way of microbiologists when they find some weird bug to ogle at, and told her that she just _had to_ come to the hospital where she was doing her residency.

Asking about the fact that she had felt a decidedly male reaction in Vaun’s lower regions made her feel like a stupid, tittering teenager in sex ed class. And she hated it.

Quinlan cocked his head at her.

“So, _strigoi_ have no sexual organs. Some type of… I don’t know, helminth-related leprosy? Whatever. But I know that, uh…or I think… that Vaun…I mean...”

The dumb stuttering teenager again.

The blue-eyed half-breed smiled slightly at her consternation, the bastard.

“Born share those human features,” he explained. “But we are unable to create offspring. Not by human means, nor by the means of the _strigoi _.”__

__“Oh.”_ _

__She had not noticed it in her embarrassment, but as she thought of what Quinlan had told her, she felt that her skin had grown warm. The chills had receded, and a terrible heat was starting to creep into her bones, heating her cheeks and weighing her thoughts down with what felt like molten lead._ _

__“Quinlan… it’s… getting worse now.”_ _

__She threw the blanket off her, laying down on her back on the pallet._ _

__“What should I do?”_ _

__“Nothing yet,” she told him. “If I get too hot, you have to take me to the showers and cool me down. Didn’t Vaun tell you?”_ _

__“A moment,” he said, his gaze growing distant and his already tiny pupils shrinking into nearly nothing._ _

__She said nothing as she laid there, feeling the first trickles of salty sweat slide down her skin inside of her clothes. Quinlan’s attentions were seemingly far away, but soon he returned and blinked down at her._ _

__“I know what to do, should it come to that,” he said, sitting down on the crate across from the pallet where Vaun usually rested. It disturbed her, a little, to see someone who was not Vaun sit there._ _

__“Let’s hope it doesn’t,” she said._ _

__For once, her hope for survival of another cycle was not wholly based in the fear of death that haunted her. As the fever started to envelop her in its scorching miasma, she realized that she wanted to survive, if only for a few more days, in order to share them with the creature that was soon to be her executioner._ _

____

* * *

____

__The task at hand had been more difficult than usual for Vaun._ _

__He had sensed the infected status of the young woman immediately as she huddled in a glassy, stylish wine chamber with the woman who had borne her. He could smell the scratch in her caramel skin, and he knew that he had to extinguish the tentative hope that had glimmered in her dark eyes as he and his hunters executed the _strigoi_ that were plaguing them on the other side of the glass._ _

__There had been two children as well, the children of the survivor from flight seven-five-three, confused and weeping and thoroughly terrorized. One of the _strigoi_ was the creature that had once been their mother. It had been pounding on the glass with dead hands and a violent type of frenetic zeal, trying to get in to drink, and likely turn, the children within. The gossamer wisps of its red hair had created a mangy halo around the mostly-bald head._ _

__He had taken short solace in inspecting the children even though he knew they had not been corrupted. They were so innocent, so fragile, and yet he knew that the memory of their young faces would help him do what he had to do to the child of another. With her death, he would be one step closer to ensuring that the children would not one day end up in the feeding pens or breeding cages of the _strigoi_._ _

__He hated himself when his stinger coiled with interest, emitting noises that most likely frightened the little ones even more. And he hated himself for the fact that he knew how sweet a child’s blood tasted._ _

__The scream of the older woman as he executed her flesh and blood had cut into him with an edge sharper than that of any of the shattered glass from the wine chamber._ _

__He growled a greeting at Quinlan where he sat on the crate opposite Natalie’s pallet. He saw her sleeping form there, relieved that she was still alive, relatively speaking. Striding to one of the padlocked chambers, he unlocked it, divested himself of his weapons, and returned to his comrade._ _

__“How is she?” he asked Quinlan as he surveyed her where she lay._ _

__He noticed a bucket of water nearby with a small, wet towel flung carelessly over its rim._ _

__“Resting well now,” his brother-in-arms replied._ _

__“She remained mostly lucid during her fever,” Quinlan continued. “I kept her cool with water. It was a far cry from what you showed me. Once her temperature dropped to normal levels, she fell asleep.”_ _

__“Good,” Vaun said, more relieved than he had thought that he would be. “I wonder… if there is a chance that perhaps… somehow, she will recover from this.”_ _

__Quinlan’s face darkened at that, and Vaun saw the pain there._ _

__“Vaun, brother… I know that you care for her. She cares for you, as well. But you know that she is dying. Don’t delude yourself into thinking that she will live. You know that she will not. Do not cause yourself more pain. It will haunt you for a millennia.”_ _

__Vaun placed his hand on his comrade’s shoulder._ _

__“I know. I should not let myself care about her. Yet I do. And I will regret it, I know.”_ _

__“Yes,” Quinlan agreed. “But when she is gone, you will honor her humanity the way I honor the humanity of the one I loved. It will help you.”_ _

__They stayed silent for a while then, each wrapped up in the thoughts of their own doomed dalliances._ _

__“I must be off,” Quinlan told him then. “I will be going back to Europe. There are some matters that… require my attention. I will be back.”_ _

__“The humans will probably restrict traffic into Manhattan. Most likely air traffic, as well,” Vaun pointed out._ _

__“I know. It will not be a problem. I have a good pilot.”_ _

__“I hope so,” Vaun replied, and started a little when Quinlan embraced him as a true brother._ _

__His brother-in-arms had never done this before, and Vaun had never wondered why, having no cause to think about it. Such contact seemed far too human for the likes of them to share. Yet now, he suspected that his current situation made them truly brothers, more than they had ever been._ _

__When Quinlan had departed, Vaun seated himself on his crate. There he sat for some time, silently watching Natalie as she slept, noting the minute changes in her face as she dreamt. At times, she emitted little sighing of snuffling sounds in her sleep._ _

__Soon enough, he found himself standing over her and before long, he had sank onto the pallet beside her body. She smelled of the remnants of sickness and briny human sweat, but it mattered very little to him as he fingered the waistband of her trousers briefly, his fingers then traveling underneath her shirt. He placed a bare hand on her belly. The contact of his much warmer skin caused her to jerk awake, temporarily confused._ _

__“What? Who…” Her eyes fell on him, and for a moment, he thought that she would start to struggle._ _

__But then her face relaxed and she laid down again on her back, pulling the blanket to her chin._ _

__“Hey,” she murmured, her voice thick with sleep. “You’re back.”_ _

__“Yes,” he growled, feeling her soft flesh under his hand and the excited burbling of his stinger in his thoracic cavity._ _

__“Good. I’m… so tired. Gonna sleep… a bit more.”_ _

__He rumbled at that, intent on leaving her alone so that she could rest. But she drew him back down when he tried to rise._ _

__“Stay,” she whispered. “Please... stay. Put your hand back.”_ _

__He could not do much more than to comply, spreading his pale hand across her belly once again. He groaned deeply and his loins clenched hard when she grasped his hand and guided it to her breast, feeling the stiff peak of the rounded flesh between his fingers._ _

__She made a small contented sound that almost made him lose control, but he realized shortly that she had fallen asleep again, her small hand covering his where it cupped her breast._ _

__Once again when in her presence, he summoned his stinger from his chest willingly and bit down on it even though it squirmed with protest. Once the pain had allowed his head to clear, he swallowed his wounded proboscis down again. Only after that was he able to enter the catatonia of rest, feeling her chest rise and fall under his hand._ _

____

 

____

 

____

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **On Other Born:** I know that technically, Quinlan is the only existing Born in the canon (as far as I know). In this story, Vaun is Born as well, and from a purely statistical point of view it seemed that there should be more Born than just one, if all that’s required is a pregnant woman being bitten. In any case, I increased headcanon number of known Born to four; three currently alive. Don’t slap me. At least not too hard.
> 
> **On Trichomonas:** This is a protozoan parasite that is transmitted sexually. This is one of my favorites from a purely aesthetic point of view—its shape is very pretty with undulating membranes and flagella (“tails”) when viewed in a microscope. Or maybe you just need to be totally into parasitology to find the beauty in a nasty little critter like that. Always remember the importance of safer sex, hmm?
> 
> **On Timelines:** I honestly don’t remember how clear the timelines were in the show, and I really don’t feel like rewatching them right now, lol. For example, I’m not sure how long it was between the plane landing and Vaun’s initial appearance. So in my usual manner, I’ll mangle the timelines to fit my own little world, damnit.
> 
>  
> 
>  


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Alrighty friends, here comes my written apology in the form of some 7,200 words. Longer than usual, I know, but A) I wasn’t able to end it in any other place and B) ending it somewhere else would have been rather evil, even for a miscreant like me. I do hope you enjoy, and that I haven’t pissed you all off too badly with the wait. Toodles ‘til next time. <3

 

 

When she first started to skirt the edges of wakefulness once again, Natalie felt extremely hot. At first, her sleep-muddled brain took it for another bout of fever, but before she opened her eyes she realized that the heat was concentrated on one side of her body where she lay on her back. A strange swath of heat was across her chest.

She opened her eyes slowly, carefully cracking the film of rheum that had glued her eyelids together.

Vaun was at her side on the pallet, clothed but with a white hand on her breast. The heat of his palm had rendered the skin under his hand sticky with sweat. She turned her head slightly to look at his face, starting not a little when she did so. Even though his eyes were open, the blackness of his usually bicolored pupils covered the entire sclera, and he did not seem to be lucid. Rattling noises emerged periodically from his chest.

She wondered briefly about his hand on her until a memory skittered by in her mind, of when he had returned and joined her in her sleep.

_Oh. Right._

She moved slightly to gauge his reaction, but he did not rouse, so she carefully moved his hand from underneath her shirt, placing it carefully on his hip, instead. Then she slid out of the mold of his body. Even though the heat of his body made her sweat like a pig, she was a little loath to get up, but the call of nature and the hunger gnawing in the pit of her stomach forced her to.

She managed to finagle herself off the pallet without waking him (though she wasn’t sure if whatever state he was in could be labeled as _actual_ sleep). She was clothed in an oversized t-shirt and a pair of swimming trunks and the fabrics felt stiff with sweat. Her face felt unwashed and grimy, and when she touched her cheek with tentative fingertips, they came away shiny with oil.

Natalie relieved herself in the small bathroom and washed her hands, arms and face as well as she could, making a mental note to shower after eating. She retrieved a can of ravioli, for once taking Vaun’s place on the crate opposite her pallet. Drawing her legs up to sit cross-legged on it, she pulled the tab off of the can of pasta and ate in silence, ignoring a couple of wooden splinters that poked at the back of her thighs.

Clad in black cargo trousers and a long-sleeved military-style sweater that made her wonder how he did not just spontaneously combust, Vaun laid there, emitting the little animal-like sounds that had come to comfort her. The sweater had slid up slightly in his inertia, revealing a small strip of leathery alabaster skin. She could see small lines of scarring there as well before they disappeared underneath the clothing.

His throat was bared, and for a moment, her tomato-stained fingers stopped in mid-air before they reached her mouth.

 _How the hell did I miss_ that?

His throat featured strips of wrinkled skin that immediately made her think of vulture wattles and the sexual dimorphism of animals. The male members of some species, like vultures, turkeys, and even certain mammals, possessed a fleshy wattle in order to communicate with members of the opposite sex.

She wondered how she missed that detail when she saw him bare-chested. But then again, she supposed, she had just woken up from an exhausting bout of fever, and at the moment, his hips had apparently seemed more interesting.

Natalie continued to eat her ravioli while she thought of this feature. It didn’t take her too long to conclude that the fleshy protuberance had to be connected to his proboscis. A smooth throat wouldn’t be able to eject such an organ without damage. She wanted to remember that she had seen this in other _strigoi_.

Pleased about coming up with a feasible hypothesis, she tossed the empty can of ravioli in the waste and retrieved another can. Her brain automatically recounted the steps of the scientific method and applied them to her thoughts.

_Step one: Formulate a question. Why does he have that?_

_Step two: Research. Seen it in other strigoi._

_Step three: Construct a hypothesis. Needed for feeding; expansion of skin necessary to accommodate feeding appendage._

_Step four: Conduct an experiment to test hypothesis._

She chuckled silently to herself.

_Yeah, let’s reschedule that experiment. You already have one bite from that thing on you. Hypothesis confirmed. Kind of._

She fingered her clavicle for a moment where his proboscis had pierced her. The puncture had ripped open when she had, according to him, yanked it out of her. However, the wound had healed neatly, its jagged edges now contracted into an uneven line of black scabs.

Dessert consisted of a can of pineapple rings, and she ate them even though she knew that pineapple, even canned, would make her tongue sting. She remembered an article that she had read on the subject.

Pineapples contained an enzyme named bromelain, which essentially broke down minimal amounts of tissue in the mouth when eaten, causing burning and tingling in the process.

 _The pineapple I’m eating is eating me,_ she thought.

After she had finished her meal, she disposed of the empty cans in her waste bucket and retrieved some clean clothing from the storage cabinet. Considering the amount of clean clothing left, she decided to bring the plastic THANK YOU! COME AGAIN!-bag that currently held her dirty laundry. It was time to wash some clothes.

She made quick work of the shadowy trip to the shower room, ignoring the childish images that flashed by in her mind, of smoky fingers reaching for her from the darkness to pull her under. Still, the faint, yellow light from the shower room was comforting.

Turning one of the showers on, she yelped and hopped back for a moment when the water sputtered out, feeling fairly icy on her warmed skin. When it had warmed to a tolerable level, she sat down on the tile floor just beyond the spattering circlet of water that the shower produced and got to work, soiled clothes and shampoo in hand.

It took her a good twenty minutes by her estimation to wash all of the clothes, and another few to hang them as best as she could on the chrome showerheads to dry. Finally, she peeled the t-shirt and shorts that she had been wearing, bunched them up by her feet, and washed herself, stomping and wiggling her feet into the bundle to clean it as she showered.

The shampoo that she had left to wash her hair with was unmistakably aftershave-scented, but it mattered very little to her and she sighed with how good it felt to wash her hair, imagining that she could feel the sweat and oil dissolving from the dark strands.

It was amazing, really, what a simple shower could do.

She dressed in her last clean clothes and returned to the storage chambers, finding the pallet now empty and Vaun in one of the adjoining rooms. She stopped just beyond the gridded gate that he had opened. Her companion was inside, fully clothed and vested in that ridiculous black gear of his, strapping various implements of grievous bodily harm to his legs and arms and who knew where else.

“Hey,” she said, not surprised when he didn’t spin around like most people would at a sudden presence behind them. His senses seemed to be sharper than what was fair.

“I must go,” he told her, and she watched his pale fingers as they deftly fastened buckles and velcro.

 _Velcro-vamp,_ her brain commented absurdly.

“Alright,” she replied. “I’m coming with you.”

That made him turn and face her. His face was as inscrutable as ever, his long mouth like the impartial not-grin of a moray eel. Natalie turned and went to her pile of outerwear, pulling on her _Thing_ -parka and being grateful that the last pair of clean pants had been, in fact, _pants_. Another pair of shorts would not have been pleasant in the cold outside. Vaun followed her.

“Natalie…”

“It’s not a request,” she told him as she pulled on boots and parka. “I am coming with you.”

* * *

Vaun watched her silently for a second before sensing the smoky tendrils of the Ancients curl at the base of his skull. They had awoken him from his inertia with an order to track down a human that had apparently shown great promise to be an allied human hunter.

As always, the order had been sent into his mind like a missile, with little warning. The Old Ones rarely included him or any others in the planning stages of their strategizing.

The man’s name had roused him as it started to reverberate in his head, the arcane murmur growing louder until he acknowledged it.

Apparently, the young man was in the process of mobilizing his own little militia against the _strigoi_ , which was encouraging. But anyone with motivation enough to take such action had to be brought into the fold of Sun Hunters. After all, those positions were gapingly vacant at the moment. He wondered briefly if Natalie could have been trained to fill one of those vacancies, had her days not been numbered.

Since the Ancients were not able to track the mind of a human, he would have to do the tracking by utilizing more mundane means. The logical place to start was at the man’s dwelling, and if nothing else, it would allow Vaun to physically register the human’s scent.

Vaun could sense that the Old Ones were not too pleased with the fact that Natalie insisted on accompanying him. They scratched around his brain stem briefly, like agitated little rodents. Finally they gave a resounding mental snarl at human stubbornness, retreating from his mind with a faint, if irritated sense of compliance at Natalie’s proclamation.

“Fine,” conceded as she laced the hiking boots that had belonged to their last human ally. “We’re going to Harlem.”

“Great. I need to look for some more food.”

“You need to be careful,” he continued. “Get behind me at the first hint of trouble.”

She made a small grimace at him, but told him that she would.

“It’s not like I can get infected _again,_ ” she mumbled before adding: “So, what’s your homework today?”

“Another human,” he said after giving her a queer look. “Like the one before you. One that is motivated to help us hunt strigoi during sunlight hours.”

She nodded, and finished fastening all of the outerwear that had once been Neil’s.

“Let’s go,” she said, reaching for his gloved hand.

He took it.

* * *

The sky was rapidly darkening into an inky color as they made their way into the city. Little specks of milky stars started to wink into existence, obscured here and there by gray ribbons of clouds that brought with them a promise of more snow. It didn’t take long for Vaun to flick on the full halogen lights of the SUV to light their path. Natalie’s hand rested once again on his thigh as she quietly watched the road before them.

Her hand should have felt cool, considering that the temperature of her body ran much lower than his own. And yet it didn’t; he could clearly feel the warmth of it, but it was a different kind of heat. Perhaps it was the heat of the still-living as opposed to the heat of the perpetually damned.

The city was a queer blend of tentative apocalypse and the normal bustle of any metropolis, with many businesses displaying their bright neon “OPEN”-signs. In contrast, others were darkened and some were even boarded up and spray-painted with desperate litanies for divine help. Humans with large cardboard signs, reading “THE END IS NIGH” or “REPENT NOW” dotted every handful of blocks. He remembered seeing similar things in other times of pestilence.

They reached Harlem in continued silence. Snowflakes started to fleck the air as he parked their vehicle in an alleyway next to the building where the young man lived. He watched a rooster’s tail of condensation escape Natalie’s mouth as she got out of the car. Her pale cheeks flushed a little in response to the cold, while he knew that his own stayed pallid and dead.

Vaun got out of the car and secured it, then making sure that all of his weapons were where they needed to be. He patted himself down, his questing fingers feeling the familiar outlines of knife and gun and a few small frag grenades, the fragmentation matrix of the latter constructed with tiny fragments of silver with a millesimal fineness of nine-nine-nine. Purer silver would do the most damage.

He had, for a brief time, considered using sterling silver instead, which was more common and held a fineness of nine-two-five, that is, ninety-two point five percent pure silver. The rest of the alloy would be amended with copper, creating a jewelry silver that was far easier to find than ninety-nine point nine percent silver.

The human adage of “go big or go home” had sprung to mind then, and he had abandoned the sterling idea. He had constructed these frag grenades to be defensive rather than offensive; the tradeoff for a smaller casualty radius being that there was less chance for him to sustain damage from the silver.

He still had, a couple of times, remembering the acidic burning of the silver specks as they entered his body. He had been lucky enough only to take damage in his limbs, sustaining tiny fragmental damage in his legs and arms, with his upper body otherwise protected by Kevlar. He had spent quite a few hours digging them out of his flesh on those instances, wincing a little each time he managed to pluck one out.

Vaun considered for a moment to bring his large, customized rifle which would fire fatal silver bolts at an enemy. He went to the trunk to retrieve it, but then thought better of it. Logistics suggested that an apartment building of this type would have rather narrow hallways, in which a large weapon could prove to be cumbersome. He decided to leave it, turning instead to Natalie and indicating to her with a nod that they were going up.

“No crazy huge-ass gun today?” she gibed, and he actually smiled a little at that, his insides tightening a bit when she returned the smirk.

She fell in behind him as he tried a side door of the building and found it unlocked, slipping inside the shadowy hallway. The bottom floor was devoid of apartments, they found, instead featuring a laundry room, storage chambers and stairs leading to a basement area.

Vaun stopped briefly, closing his eyes and searching for the memory of a scent delivered to him by the Ancients.

Salt. Musk, unique to each human. The scent of blood, metallic and rich and with a trace of something he could not have described if he had tried, something equally unique as human musk. It was the scent of the invisible microcosm of blood; the exclusive way that its components interacted with each other. It was a chemical dance of platelet and leukocyte and protein and countless other components, down to the very atoms that they were all comprised of; each dance unique to each human, its movements heard as much as smelled by _strigoi_ and cross-breed alike.

He caught a few molecules of the man’s scent then; he could already tell that the man was not in the building any longer, his scent trailing in another direction before disappearing into the night outside the opposite section of the building. It didn’t matter that much; he would still search the man’s domicile. And perhaps, his thoughts added, the place would yield some of the human foods that Natalie was searching for.

* * *

True to form, Natalie tried to make a beeline for the kitchen that lay just within the front door as soon as the unlocked door was opened. A wall of the unmistakable odor or rot hit her, and while her nose had been privy to many foul smells in the past, it was still jarring. She slapped a hand over the lower part of her face, grimacing.

“Something’s very ripe in there,” she growled, her voice muffled and nasal through her fingers. “It’s a dead body,” she added.

Going to the morgue to ogle at brain tissue through a microscope in order to identify amoebic meningoencephalitis had been a wonderful teacher in the subject of decomposition odors.

Vaun nodded.

“It’s the body of a _strigoi,_ ” he said, going inside.

The apartment was abandoned. A few dust motes frolicked in the light when it was switched on, shedding minute particles of dust that sparkled briefly in the light before settling. Aside from the stench of the rotting carcass, there was a smell of spoiled food and an acrid note of stale urine in the air. She realized after a short time that it was not actually urine, but rather the ammonia smell of _strigoi_.

The kitchen was drab and outdated with cheap, patterned laminate flooring and old, brown hickory cabinets featuring brass pulls that were situated in the middle of each cabinet door. The fridge was a yellow color reminiscent of stained teeth, and the walls echoed the same shade. Natalie didn’t even try opening the fridge, knowing that whatever was in there was probably growing things by now that no human should consume.

She stayed in the kitchen and watched Vaun as he entered the living room next to the cooking space. A large interior window next to the fridge allowed her to see as he circled something on the living room floor, his eyes downcast. The yellow lights that he had flicked on paired with the stained seafoam walls in the living room painted his gaunt features a sickly-looking color.

Natalie rounded the corner into the living room and the source of the stench, if only out of morbid curiosity. Corpses had never bothered her, but when she saw the creature on the living room floor, she had to swallow twice. A garish statue of the Virgin Mary sat on a table nearby, silently joining them in staring at the corpse.

Its face had been bashed in with a blunt object, yet she could still see a bit of its limp stinger in the mess of its broken teeth and shattered jaws. A tiny space next to the corner of one eye was still intact, revealing a teardrop tattoo. Other inked designs adorned the thing’s meaty arms and chest. Natalie swallowed a third time and returned to the kitchen.

“Who is he?” she called to Vaun who abandoned his interest in the corpse, now moving about and examining pictures on the walls.

She saw him raise his hand to a photo on the wall next to the interior window.

“The brother, I think. Of the one I’m looking for.”

He was silent for a couple of seconds then before speaking again.

“There was another _strigoi_ here recently. His mother, by the smell of it. She was infected. She’ll try to find her son now, no matter where he goes.”

Natalie had started to examine the insides of the cabinets, but her questing hands that had been turning cans and fingering cereal boxes stopped.

“I thought that they didn’t retain any of their former selves.”

“They don’t,” Vaun explained, “They’re imbued with a instinctual urge to find those closest to them and infect them as well. The urge is supposedly stronger than the blood-hunger.”

She responded with a thoughtful humming sound, resuming her search. She rummaged around for a bit while Vaun snooped about the rest of the apartment. She did find quite a few things to restock her larder at the compound.

The cabinets yielded cans of fruit, tuna, beans, pasta, corn and some mushrooms. There were packages of dry rice and pasta and beans as well, but she had no means of cooking them back at the compound, so she left them where they were.

Further searching revealed some candy bars, protein bars, an unopened bag of sugar and and a a sealed bag of sour candies; a couple of glass jars of manzanilla olives and a jar of pickled jalapeños. There was an untouched box of frosted cereal as well, which she added to her pile of foodstuffs.

She even found a pack of cigarettes, and while she hadn’t smoked in four years, she decided that if there was any time for a smoke, that time was when the world was ending. It’d probably make her throw up, but oh well. She also pocketed a pack of matches.

By the time Vaun was done with searching the rooms for this hunter of his, she had filled two canvas shopping bags with her loot. She felt guilty, a little bit, for essentially looting someone’s home. But, she reasoned, two of its inhabitants were either dead or turned, and the third one not likely to return to the place that was now the mausoleum of his loved ones.

Vaun joined her in the kitchen and she noticed how the light in the apartment severely outlined the scars on his face. Some of them traversed his face diagonally, looking almost like the lashes from a whip. Unbidden, she brought a hand to his face and trailed some of the scars with her thumb, even though the thought did strike her that this apartment of ripe corpses and _strigoi_ was probably not a stellar place for these things.

Suddenly, Vaun stiffened and Natalie heard it too, the telltale warbling song of the _strigoi_. Worse yet, the thing sounded like it was shuffling around nearby. She snatched her hand back from his face and grabbed her bags of loot, hurrying out of the apartment with Vaun at her side.

Sure enough, only some thirty feet down the corridor, the _strigoi_ stood swaying, alone; looking a bit like an old drunk until its head snapped up from between its hunched shoulders.

It was, or had once been, a young woman. Its honey-blonde hair, undoubtedly once carefully coiffed and healthy, was no more than a few strands still clinging to its white skull. It was still clothed in the waitress uniform of whatever restaurant where the woman had worked. The white blouse was stained with gore and dirt.

A black, torn pencil skirt revealed ripped pantyhose below, the once shapely legs emblazoned with scratches and filth and the lingering stench of ammonia from when it had secreted the liquid remains of its latest blood meal. One black kitten-heeled shoe was still on one foot, while its companion was missing. The bared toes were so tattered and damaged that Natalie could barely tell them apart.

The thing that had once been a woman turned towards them, and Natalie recognized the sounds it emitted. Growls that were neither human nor animal blended with a staccato chittering of perpetual hunger.

Natalie dropped her bags, her loot hitting the floor with a dull _thunk_. With one rapid movement, Vaun shoved her behind his slender body and produced two knives from who the fuck knew where faster than she was able to comprehend. Like a child, she peeked out from around his shoulder as he poised to dispatch the _strigoi_ that now displayed more than just a casual interest in them.

The creature lunged, its jaws unlocking and gaping grotesquely as it scrabbled madly towards them. Vaun’s body tensed as he prepared to dispatch it. It nearly reached them when suddenly, its lunge was halted in mid-stride, its body freezing in an unnatural way. The _strigoi_ squealed with distress and jerked briefly against some invisible bonds before stilling.

Natalie grasped Vaun’s upper arm, somehow feeling better when she felt the heavy fabric of his clothing between her fingers. She felt his body tense further now as the thing in front of them stopped as if arrested by an invisible wall.

Then she saw a red flash its eyes, a vivid flash the color of blood and fire and death; the terrible and beautiful glimmer of sentience. Its body straightened and its jaws locked again, the half-ejected proboscis slithering down into its anchorage.

Natalie watched, disgusted and fascinated, as the appendage forced its way down through the new wattle of its throat. There were red furrows in the loose flesh, likely from when it had taken its first feeding before its blood had changed, however that whole mess worked. She saw the skin and scabbing strain and crack as the proboscis forced it to bulge anew.

“Born,” the _strigoi_ hissed then, the mouth that had once been full and beautiful and painted a shade of pink coral emitting a deep, reverberating voice that had no place in a female body.

“Deceiver,” Vaun growled back with such venom that Natalie instinctively tried to step out of the back of his body.

He reached back and yanked her arm hard, bringing her back. She almost stumbled on a few of the cans that had rolled out of her canvas bags.

“I see that you are still under the yoke of my Brethren,” the thing replied, its voice horrifying and exquisite at the same time.

Natalie was thoroughly alarmed when she felt something in her blood respond to that dreadful sound; something treasonous squirmed inside of her with a desire to follow, to obey, to sing praises at every syllable. Nearly panicking, she swallowed hard and blinked against the tears that threatened to emerge. She was _not_ going to cry, not here, not now, not in front of… _that._

“Such a disappointment,” the creature snarled, spittle flying from its lips in tiny ropes. “Just like that unintended issue of mine. Trying to preserve the cattle at the detriment of your own pleasure and well-being.”

“Balance must be maintained. The Ancient Ones know this wisdom. You are an insult to their honor.”

Its furious, derisive shriek made Natalie want to cover her ears.

“Honor! Balance! The fantasies of sentimental old fools. Nature adheres to the survival of the fittest, and we are destined to overcome.”

Before Vaun could spit a reply, the thing’s red eyes flashed again, refocusing. It tilted its head and Natalie almost vomited from pure horror when they zeroed in on her where she cowered behind her companion.

“What’s this?” it cooed at her, smiling, the corners of its mouth that had recently split after feeding opening again like paper cuts.

“You speak of balance and honor, yet here is your own little bovine blood bag. Hypocritical. And expected.”

Natalie felt a tugging inside of her, as if something was yanking on the door to who she was, but not quite being able to wrench it open. Still, she felt it peer rapaciously into the keyhole, catching hazy glimpses of a mind that had once been her own.

She felt herself grow cold as she realized that her own _strigoi_ -infection might have progressed farther than she knew. Her chest tightened and her belly churned with nausea. She reeled backwards, stumbling on the cans again and this time, falling on her ass on the dirty linoleum floor. Her tailbone protested with a sharp stab of pain that shot up her spine and her palm accidentally crushed her box of frosted cereal.

The thing that had once been a waitress with a life of her own cackled. Its mouth split further until fresh white blood started to trickle from the newly fissured corners.

“I see,” it snorted. “The level of your wretchedness is astounding, Born. You would _rut_ with this thing, like lesser animals. Repulsive!”

Apparently, Vaun had heard enough and charged at the thing, a hateful scream ripping from his lungs. The creature saw him coming and without taking its eyes off Natalie and without much effort at all, it drove an unyielding fist Vaun’s chest, sending him sprawling next to her. He landed hard, the back of his hooded head thumping dully into the floor.

She heard the bones in its hand crumble at the impact, but it gave no indication of even noticing as it lowered its hand once again. Her eyes darted to the hand in question, and indeed, every finger was now contorted and broken.

“And yet,” it continued smugly as if it had never been interrupted, “This bovine is not yours. And it will not be cattle for much longer. How amusing!”

It laughed again and Vaun groaned next to her; it was a sound of physical pain and torment of another, deeper kind. Reaching for the multitude of pockets on his pants, he started to fervently search them. His white fingers that were usually so adroit seemed clumsy and trembling as he groped the fabric for whatever he was looking for.

“Little one,” the monster in front of them crooned, stepping closer until it looked down at them and Natalie could see the horrible intelligence simmer in its blood-red eyes.

Like a deer in headlights, she froze as it leaned down toward her.

“When you Become, you will be mine and you will be so much more than just a filthy hole for this half-breed to use.”

The only sound Natalie could produce in response was a terrified, mournful croak.

“Yes, little one. Soon, your evolution will be complete. I will show you joys beyond the pastimes of animals. You will be more than you have _ever_ been.”

And goddamnit— _fucking goddamnit_ —she started to cry and the miscreant above her laughed delightedly. Its dark voice was cruel and tempting and ugly and hideously beautiful until it was cut off by a loud gunshot that made her ears ring and allowed her to not hear the echo of its words for a brief time.

The bullet from Vaun’s handgun had pierced its forehead, exploding at the back of its skull and spattering the hallway with creamy-white viscera that made her glad that she would never eat Pasta Alfredo again. The body of the waitress crumpled onto the floor like a discarded rag doll. But after the initial shock of the loud noise, Natalie could not do anything but sob like a child until Vaun gathered her bags together again, took her by the arm and leaned her into the side of his body.

Wordlessly, he led her out of the building and back to the car while she cried into his vest, tears and snot smearing the black fabric as she wept with fear, anger and the unfairness of it all until she had no more tears left. Vaun gently helped her climb into the passenger seat and before he had taken place in the driver’s seat, she had fallen into a troubled sleep where the thing that had forced her fears down her throat still mocked her.

* * *

Vaun stirred from his rest where he laid, once again at Natalie’s side. By the time they had returned to the compound, she had been exhausted and silent, saying nothing. Instead, she had stripped off parka and boots, swallowed four little pale blue pills and bundled herself in her musty blankets on the pallet.

He had considered going to the pen where they kept the… _humans_ … that were intended for feeding. He was hungry, but decided that he could stave off a feeding for another day or two. In light of recent events, something within him strained violently against the thought of feeding just now.

So instead, he had laid down at her side and she roused temporarily, her green eyes hazy and rimmed with redness and her face swollen and pink. Nevertheless, she curled into his body so that they laid belly to belly, her face in his chest. He listened to her as she emitted a few hiccuping noises before her breathing evened out again and she slept.

His hand splayed at the small of her back as he pulled her closer and the action made her lower belly rub tantalizingly against his loins. It had made him feel inexplicably guilty when the contact made his loins react, but a long time of ignoring the call of his body allowed him distance himself from it.

And now as he became fully aware, he felt her bare hands on him. One of her legs was thrown over his hip, the living heat of her radiating into him. Her tempting female scent, piquant and warm, reached him. It crept into his olfactory byways and embedded itself sweetly into his tongue and his body responded painfully, causing him to clench his jaws together hard.

The soft pads of her fingers tugged at the waistband of his trousers briefly before her sweaty palm slid flush against the planes of his stomach and dipped under the heavy fabric. He gave a tortured groan that was tinged with the high-pitched whine of his stinger when her trembling hand closed around his length. It stiffened even more in her grasp.

“Ah… Natalie…”

“Please, Vaun,” she breathed. “I need… I need to _feel_. I need to feel that I’m still me.”

“I won’t be... ah… able to stop…”

“Then don’t,” she murmured.

She tilted her head up toward him and through a growing haze of lust he saw her face come closer, still swollen and bedraggled, and then her lips brushed his. Helplessly, he opened his mouth for her tongue. Her breath was sour and muddled with sleep, but it didn’t matter at all, especially when he felt her blunt little teeth bite him, payment in kind for the times he had bitten her, and he nearly came undone right then and there.

And then suddenly his hands were clutching hard at her round hips. His hard grip seemed to frighten her, a little, and she grasped his wrists as if to steer his hands away. But at that point, Vaun knew that he was well beyond that.

He gathered himself, rose and knelt over her, hooking his fingers into the waistband of the trousers that she was wearing. With one hard yank, he tore them off her, hearing the fabric protest with ripping sounds as he pulled them off her feet and tossed them aside.

She gasped, the sound a blend of fear and arousal, and he could not even be ashamed when he realized that her fear only inflamed him more. His stinger squirmed painfully in his chest and he let out a gurgling growl as it tried to force itself free from inside his ribcage.

For a moment he saw her through the fog of urges that clouded him. Her eyes were wide and unblinking and her dark hair was mussed where it splayed across the pallet. Her lips were parted and her breath came in shallow little snatches that made the hard points on her chest very pronounced under the fabric of her shirt. He could see some of her scarring along her jawbone and a shoulder that had been exposed due to the too-large shirt. The darkened little dots seemed to dance.

He gave a gurgling groan when he glimpsed the part of her that he had just bared, even though she tried to close her legs under his scrutiny. He reached for her with trembling fingers, dipping them between her legs, grazing the soft, dark hair there and feeling the slippery softness of her flesh.

Then he found himself undoing his tactical trousers with a swiftness that had been absent when they had encountered the Master. Zippers and buttons and buckles clinked, but he didn’t bother to remove them completely, only baring enough of himself to take her, get inside of her, get _inside_...

“Vaun,” she whispered as he freed himself, her voice thick. “Vaun, please, I…”

She used his name as something that sounded like both a supplication and a protest. Vaun could no longer think about the latter option. Kneeling, he pulled her lower body into his lap, forcing her legs open with his slender hips. He felt the minute flutter of blood rushing through her femoral artery as the insides of her white, quivering thighs cradled his waist.

When his hard, feverish flesh pressed against her opening, he felt his stinger slither up his throat with a disturbing type of furor.

“Vaun...”

He pushed into her slick body with one hard, smooth thrust, and all coherent thought vanished from his mind when she arched her back and threw her head back, crying out skyward, the fevered pitch of her voice nearly hurting his ears. Her blunt fingernails dug hard into his forearms when he hilted inside of her.

Her flesh closed tightly around him, silken and alive, and he could not contain a tortured roar.

* * *

Natalie couldn’t even recognize the sound that she heard herself utter when he thrust into her. He stayed still for a few moments, the gravelly rattling sounds in his chest making his body almost vibrate, the reverberation travelling from his flesh and into hers where they connected. The scent of him enveloped her in a miasma of scorched earth and leather.

Then he withdrew slowly and pushed into her once more, and she groaned deeply against the sensation of the wet, tight slide of his flesh into hers. It teetered on just this side of pain due to his abnormally high body heat. And then he started to move roughly, shoving her with the desperate violence of his thrusts and she moaned each time he filled her, again and again and again, her moans cut off harshly each time as he drove deep into her, chasing the breath from her lungs.

She felt the wall behind her head and he withdrew for a few seconds, leaving her feeling hollow until he pushed a hand into the concrete above her head, his other hand gripping hard enough at her thigh for reddened dimples to appear underneath his fingertips. Tiny concrete particles drifted down into her face from where his fingers clawed into the composite. And then he firmly slid inside of her again and fucked her, ruthlessly, using the wall to brace himself and to be able to thrust harder.

It had been a long time since he had partaken in this type of activity, and she felt herself tear, but she would not, _could not_ , care. Pleasure and pain smoldered through her body, and she savored the sensations equally, confirming that she was still herself, a live being able to think and eat and shit and fuck as she saw fit.

Beyond these thoughts, she saw Vaun’s face. His severe features were tense with pleasure, the dark hollows beneath his cheekbones showing his clenched jaws. The weak lighting in the chambers where it backlit him made his eyes disappear almost completely into the recesses under his protruding brow, almost making it look like he had nothing there but empty sockets.

And yet, she saw his eyes. Amidst the dark ecstasy in his gaze she saw a reflection of her own desperation, the fundamental need to confirm that neither of them was ruled by anyone else. She saw a glimpse of something predatory there as well, and she knew immediately what it was.

So when he took his hand from the wall above her and released her thigh, his hands clasping on her wrists on either side of her head, she bared her throat willingly. His savage growl would not have brooked any arguments in any case.

Natalie felt his teeth graze across the vulnerable skin there, and she was not quite sure if he’d be able to resist the temptation of her jugular. His teeth sank into her shoulder instead and the pain of it bloomed in her body, chewing her nerves raw and causing her to utter a sound of deep agony.

She felt something else, something different where he bit her, something fleshy throbbing and scrabbling there, and she realized that it was his stinger lapping at her.

Morbidly, the thought of being pierced by it while he was inside of her was dizzying, and Natalie felt a gathering knot of pleasurable tension build in her lower belly. Growls thrummed against her shoulder where his mouth was savaging her and the stinger pulsed in time with his snapping hips.

And then the proboscis pierced her shoulder, and the knot inside of her came undone and she could not help the trembling scream that escaped her. Her world shattered, the pain and pleasure of it all scattered into shards of pure sensation that could no longer be differentiated from one another.

Her body bucked and spasmed under the grip of his hands and jaws and just as she thought that she could not take it anymore, she felt the needle of his proboscis slide out of her shoulder and his jaws unlock from her.

His hands released her wrists and she pulled him closer, catching the alabaster skin of his neck between her teeth and bit down, hard. It caused him to emit a loud series of raspy snarls, and after only a few moments his movements grew erratic.

After one last deep thrust that made Natalie feel like her midsection might split, he spent himself inside of her with a rattling, hissing sound. The unfamiliar sensation of his unnaturally heated seed filled her, and for a moment she felt like it would burn her into cinders; finding that she did not care one bit.

Vaun remained pressed against her for some time as her breathing slowed. His growls and grunts soon tapered off into faint rumbles. Natalie clenched her jaws when he withdrew from her, leaving behind an empty ache and the slick feeling of his seed as it trickled out of her. As he moved off her, he glanced at her thighs. He locked eyes with her then with a strange, troubled look.

She winced a little, sucking in air through clenched teeth when she felt his hot fingers brush against the sore, swollen flesh between her legs. His white fingers came away wet with their mingled fluids, but also streaked with her blood.

“You’re bleeding. Did I hurt you?”

“No,” she said immediately, even if there had been quite a bit of pain. “Don’t worry about it.”

Another strange look from him, until she asked him to lie down with her again. They could probably both use some rest after this, she added.

She saw a twitch at the corners of his mouth at that, and he laid down again after situating himself and closing his trousers. Lying on his side, he pulled her into his body and she relaxed even as she felt herself start to sweat due to his accursed body heat, adding to the perspiration that already coated her skin like a briny membrane.

When the pounding in her blood finally slowed, she allowed herself to relax. She couldn’t even be irritated with herself when she felt her abated tension give way to tears. She felt Vaun stir with concern behind her as she started to sob again, not caring anymore that the raw insides of her human frailties would be exposed.

Thankfully, her companion said nothing at all, and Natalie wept silently for herself with the self-pity that was so characteristic of humans when faced with the cold indifference of life and death.

 

 


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Finally, I finished this chapter. I won't apologize and explain why it was so late; most of you know how nutty my schedule can be. As always, I will just thank you for sticking with me. <3 And oh, there's a lot of... activity in this chapter.
> 
> P.S. When this new Larr(?) person appeared in S3, all I could think about was: "I am Lrrr, ruler of Omicron Persei 8!".

 

 

The amber light from the storage chambers cast a dim glow into the darkness of the concrete corridor. Natalie had seated herself right next to the passageway into the chambers, holding the door open with her body to allow the light out. In comparison to the shadows of the corridor, the light was like a swath of wet paint enveloping her. The smoke from her cigarette created little tendrils and ringlets in the air.

Crushing out the cigarette (her third) on the concrete, she coughed a bit and fished out another one out of the pack that she had found in the apartment in Harlem.

Inexplicably (or perhaps not), the cigarettes felt like old, estranged friends. After crushing out her fourth one, she forced another short cough and felt how the lining of her throat protested with a rush of tobacco-flavored phlegm.

She had roused after what only felt like a tiny nap to Vaun’s greedy hands on her and his white hips opening her legs. Her inner thighs had still been sticky with their congealing fluids as he settled between them. She had welcomed him into her once more, but there hadn’t been much pleasure in it for her the second time; she was just too sore. And she noticed how clumsy his hands were, his feverish growling and fervent movements as he tried to thrust inside of her as fast as possible. Natalie realized then that he was likely inexperienced in these matters.

True, she had climaxed with him the first time, but now Natalie suspected that it was more a matter of her not having had sex in a long time, coupled with a paroxysmal release of tension and deep anxiety.

She decided that when Vaun returned from wherever he had scuttled off to in the compound and if he felt so inclined, she would have to try some things with him while their dalliance continued until… until she could not continue it any longer.

She did have to give him credit for the fact that he had quickly noticed her discomfort as he fucked her for the second time.

When Vaun stopped pushing into her and asked if she was all right, she had told him that she was tired and sore. He withdrew his still hard flesh from her immediately, unsure, asking after a few moments if he had displeased her.

Natalie told him no. And he hadn't, not really. She was, in fact, pretty achy from their first encounter. With a tired smile that made him emit a trill of interest, she added that they could try again once after she had some proper rest.

And goddamnit if she wouldn't; she would no longer spend whatever time she had left wallowing in her self-pity, reserving all those emotions for when the end came instead. She would snatch up whatever joy she could in the meantime, even though it was with a creature that was the epitome of everything her scientific mind had once rebelled against.

That was not to say that she found Vaun repulsive; she didn't. She had never been one to shy away from anything out of the ordinary. His body and responses were very male, and while his face and that damn stinger of his were not a little alien, they both held a fascination for her. The primal desire she had seen in his eyes when they coupled was another thing. It had made her feel wanted, desired; utterly sexual. Due to the academic time restraints in her old life coupled with a stubborn insecure streak, it had been long since she felt that way.

Natalie almost lit another cigarette, intent on celebrating her apocalyptic hedonism, but decided against it due to the simple matter that her mouth was dry and bitter with the taste of tobacco. So she pocketed her pack and lighter instead. Noting that her loins were not as sore as they had been, she made quick work of a trip to the shower room where she washed and dressed in clothes that she had shampooed earlier and that were only slightly moist now.

* * *

The Ancients had called for his presence him after Natalie had fallen asleep again after his abortive attempt at taking her a second time. They had tugged and picked at the sensory memories that he had of their rutting with great interest, however, they were unable to begin to comprehend it.

The Ancients, like all _strigoi_ , lacked the necessary organs and subsequent hormonal responses for those types of activities, and as such, they were not able to relate at all. Any physical desire beyond the blood hunger was incomprehensible; trivial. They found the whole thing rather queer and quite amusing, soon forgetting about it as they updated Vaun on Quinlan’s doings.

Apparently, his brother-in-arms had gone rogue once again (this did not surprise Vaun) and would not respond to any contact attempts made by the Old Ones (this did not surprise him, either). He attempted to reach Quinlan as he walked back to the storage chambers, and while he felt a tiny wisp of interest when his comrade sensed his activities with Natalie, it soon dissipated, replaced by a forbidding wall of obsession and single-minded revenge.

Vaun had seen this in Quinlan before. It could consume him, and sometimes, decades could trickle by while his mind was nearly completely consumed with vengeance and black, unyielding rage. There was no reaching him when this unhinged compulsion took over, and nearly all sense of any camaraderie that they might have shared vanished from Quinlan’s curt, irate communications, if he even bothered to respond at all.

Vaun stopped attempting to reach through to him, knowing it was futile. For the hell of it, he stopped and leaned against a wall, concentrating his senses on reaching Hakim, the other Born still active. He did not usually attempt to reach him, and he found his cerebral muscles sluggish and slow to tune into an unusual frequency across such a distance. His cranium throbbed and he felt hot blood starting to trickle out of his ear when he finally established a tentative line of communication to his fellow Born.

 _Vaun,_ Hakim’s faint thoughts murmured in his head. There was a stretch of silence for a moment then, as if his fellow Born was confused at this spontaneous contact. _Status update?_

Vaun recalled that Hakim usually had this strangely clipped, militia-like manner in his communications. And now he was equally unsure of how to continue, not even certain as to why he had reached out to him.

 _Ah… Manhattan increasingly infested,_ he responded in the same manner. _Your status?_

_Attempting to find transportation. Difficult to find fast route to New York. Infestation currently absent in Middle-East. Human allies in rest of Europe report no activity._

Vaun knew that the Ancients had a handful of human allies in select countries who knew of their existence. Most were high-ranked military officials who had been instructed in recognizing the signs of an increasing _strigoi_ presence.

 _Understood,_ Vaun replied, feeling the line of communication wavering with his faltering concentration.

 _Anything else to report?_ Hakim nattered into his mind.

A lot of things, Vaun wanted to tell him, but kept that thought tightly guarded. He realized that his human emotions were confounding him enough where he desperately wanted someone to explain what was happening and how to deal with them. Someone who knew the way of these things.

He had no idea if Hakim did, and Quinlan, the only other half-breed in their current ranks that knew something about intimate contact with humans, had woven a dark cocoon of silence around himself that even the Ancients had difficulty penetrating. Even when they were able to do so, Quinlan remained stubbornly silent, ignoring their demanding call.

So there was little else Vaun could do but to leave those sensations unresolved.

 _Nothing else,_ he told his comrade, and felt their connection dissolve into the ether, relieving the heavy pressure that it had exerted at the back of his skull.

He took off his gloves and used them to mop at the blood that had trickled from his ear and down his neck. Depositing the gloves into one of his pockets, he continued toward the storage chambers.

He found Natalie wistfully staring into her microscope once more, seated on the floor. She had washed and changed clothes, and he could no longer smell their joining upon her. There was a faint smell of burnt tobacco on her. She looked up, smiled hastily but warmly, and peered into her machine again.

And all he could think of was her pallid, soft flesh. The thoughts were so intrusive that they almost irritated him their demanding monotony.

The women that he had paid for in the past had not responded like Natalie had. Their mien had been neutral but not disgusted, which had surprised him a little. Granted, he had made sure to keep his face cowled and hooded during their brief interactions. They had been indifferent as he clumsily coupled with them from behind. Until his predatory need to rut hard and bite had overtaken him. And then, after the blood and the screams, they simply were no more.

Natalie had writhed under him, alive and responsive; her scent one of arousal, fear, pain, and pleasure. She had bared her throat, and the need to pierce the thick vein there had been nearly overwhelming as it called to him with each pulse of her corrupted blood. But when he pierced her shoulder instead and felt her body arc under him, her cries of pain and pleasure in his ears, he knew that she had truly coupled with him. Not for coin, and not because she expected him to be something that he was not.

The second time she had again opened her thighs to him, but he had soon noticed her discomfort. The piquant scent of her arousal had been absent, and he had stopped. His body hadn't responded as fast after he withdrew from her, but his erection had finally stopped its agonizing pulsing and wilted. After she had fallen asleep again, he had washed her blood off from his lower regions as well as his face.

“ _Trypanosoma,_ ” Natalie chirped from the floor, interrupting his thoughts. “You've already seen it, I showed it to you last time.”

He crouched down next to her.

“Why do you look at them over and over? Don't they remain the same on the slides?”

“Yeah, they do,” she replied, “But they make sense. Not much else does these days.”

Surprisingly, she did not sound forlorn at that statement, and just asked him to sit down on the floor next to her. He did so, and she returned her gaze to the microscope. She continued to talk of about the organism and its different features for a while.

“ _Trypanosoma_ is an expert at hiding from our immune systems. See, when a foreign organism enters our bodies, the immune system attacks it with leukocytes and destroys it by a process called phagocytosis. When trypomastigotes enter and multiply, they are attacked as well. But just as they are about to die out, the parasite alters its appearance. Not a lot, just enough for the immune system not to recognize it. Like wearing zebra print instead of tiger print. By the time the immune system recognizes it as an invader again, it will change its appearance. _Trypanosoma_ has been found to have a huge genetic bank of different patterns, so to speak, and it will evade the immune system in this way until the victim dies. There are medications to kill it, antiparasitics… pentamidine… melarsoprol. But many people in some of the countries where this parasite is endemic don't have access to the medications….”

Even though Vaun didn't understand the technical language that she sometimes used when she spoke of her parasites, he still listened to her droning about organisms that were much like him in certain aspects. His stinger gave a lazy gurgle, but seemed disinterested. He could think of some disturbing reasons for this unusual behavior of the organ that seemed like its own entity most of the time. But he couldn't bear thinking about those reasons right now.

“All these parasites,” Natalie said then, “so tiny, yet able to outsmart and kill scores of people. For all of our scientific advancement, sometimes we’re still just a bunch of idiots fumbling in the dark.”

She beckoned him then to move a little to the nearest wall and lean against it. When he did so, she surprised him completely as she seated herself between his black clothed legs, her back against his chest. Tentatively, he clasped his forearm around her chest and she did not protest. A low purring sound started in his chest at her proximity and scent, the latter a mix of her and the tobacco she had smoked, but she just chuckled.

“Here, kitty, kitty,” she quipped and even Vaun managed to chuckle at that.

“So tell me, what will you do when… or _if_ , this plague of _strigoi_ is eradicated?”

He had not expected that question.

“Go into hibernation, I think. If there is no threat, I'm better off doing that.”

“Hibernation? What, like a bear?”

Her soft fingers stroked his forearm, fingering his scars. This serene type of proximity was queer to him, but not wholly unpleasant, save for the way his loins tightened.

“Something like that. My metabolism will slow, and my blood hunger with it. And other urges will slow, too.”

“What urges?” She asked and leaned her head back on his shoulder.

He was fairly sure that she knew what he was talking about, since he detected a small note of benevolent amusement in her voice.

“Physical.”

Natalie just hummed at that, and continued stroking his forearm. The position was becoming a bit uncomfortable for him, and not only due to the response of his body. His lower back was awkwardly angled and the pressure from the concrete wall was growing painful, and he shifted a little. When he did, Natalie moved away from him, and before he could pull her back she kneeled between his spread legs and faced him.

Her lips found his and one of her hands came to press against the back of his skull, the other at his jaw. He groaned into her mouth despite the taste of smoke on her tongue that obscured the true taste of her; trying to be mindful of his teeth this time so as not to add to the tiny scabs that he had already caused on her lips.

When she broke the kiss, she spoke. Her lips were bruised and full.

“Wanna try this again?”

“Try what?” he responded, and he saw that it took her a heartbeat to realize that this was his own way of paying her back in kind for her little gibe earlier.

“Well,” she whispered with a little crooked smirk, “Someone suddenly developed a sense of humor.”

She moved away slightly then and told him to stand, and while he was not at all pleased at having to relinquish their closeness, he did as she bade him. Remaining on her knees, she moved closer to his midsection.

He wasn't sure what she was up to, and it unnerved him, causing him to emit a hissing sound of confusion and warning. The _strigoi_ part of him made him feel vulnerable and open to attack, and perhaps his human side did, too. Other than the first time that Natalie had touched his member, which had happened while he was still clothed and her little fingers had crept underneath the lining of his trousers, no one had ever approached his midsection in this way.

“Vaun, just relax,” she murmured, turning her face upward to meet his. “I bet you'll like this.”

He was not sorry that he had heeded her when he felt her fingers land on the closure of his trousers, picking them open and lowering them to his knees, exposing him in a way that he hadn't even been during their first coupling.

She grasped his white cock with her smooth hands. He hissed at the jarring sensation of the pads of her fingers palming him, his body nearly undulating. But when he felt her soft lips circle him and draw him into her mouth and her hands stroking his bare hip bones, his eyes rolled back into his skull.

* * *

Natalie was a little surprised when his body went rigid and his seed slid down her throat after only a couple of minutes of working on him with her mouth. He tasted acidic, but with an undertone of musky saltiness.

She withdrew and went to pull his trousers up again, but he stopped her. Looking back up, she was amazed to find him still hard. Her eyes widened.

 _He might lack some experience,_ she thought, _but stamina is seemingly not lacking._

“Again?”

“Yes,” Vaun growled, but when she went to take him in her mouth once more, his hand shot out into her hair and wrenched her away from his midsection. “ _Inside_ you.”

If she hadn't been kneeling, her legs would have given out at the sound of the demanding desire in his voice. His subharmonics were laced with a bestial rasp that made her feel like prey. And it made large quantities of blood, hot and heavy, rush to her nether regions with a jolting sensation. Even the faint ache of her soreness down below transformed into the sister of need, rather than its enemy.

But Natalie had a couple more ideas as she disentangled his hand from her hair and pulled him to the pallet nearby. Deciding that they needed a bit more room, she snatched up a blanket and tossed it on the floor next to the pallet. There she drew him down, his trousers still awkwardly tangled at his ankles. She pulled his boots off and the pants with them. She told him to take the rest off.

He obeyed, but added that he wanted her to do the same.

Natalie did so, lifting her hips from where she laid to open her own pants and kick them off. Her t-shirt followed without a thought.

Vaun’s scars bested her dark, spotted ones in quantity. His sinewy alabaster body was a latticework of gouges and cuts and lashes long since healed. The faint pearlescent sheen of his skin was almost hypnotic as he pounced on her after carelessly tossing his bundle of black clothing aside.

His hands immediately shot to her forearms, pinning them over her head as he crawled on top of her and attempted to wedge her legs open with his own. But she bucked him off, causing him to utter a deep rumble of urgency. His long mouth parted in a toothy snarl as he got up into a kneeling position at her side, and for a moment she thought that he might just take her anyway.

“Calm down,” she said sharply. “It’s not a marathon.”

“Give me your hand,” she told him then.

He did as she asked, and slowly, she pulled his hand to her breasts and allowed him to touch her. The frustration in his face lessened somewhat as he cupped her small breasts, his other hand joining in to prod at her. He squeezed their rounded shapes and thumbed a nipple experimentally, watching it pebble at his touch. She grasped his hand again, pulling it downward toward the apex of her thighs, watching his red-and-black eyes widen.

“Oh,” she gasped when his fingers reached her.

It was a little jarring when his abnormally hot fingers touched her there once again, but it was not long until heat of them sank into her most sensitive spots; warming and teasing. Opening her legs a bit more to give him better access, she guided him in how to stroke her sensitive external spot. He groaned when her thighs fell open further around his hand, and she arched her back a bit when he took the initiative and slid two fingers inside.

It took him some time to get the hang of it, and Natalie started to wonder if he’d sprain his hand with this experiment. She moved her hips against his hand to help him along and soon, a small orgasm washed over her, no more than a tease; a taste, but enough to leave her aching for more.

Vaun's face was tightened into a strained grimace now, his pupils dilated and black. The hissing and growing noises came from him constantly, and then tried to climb onto her body again. But she pushed him off once again and for a brief time, they struggled when he would not give up. With some force, she finally managed to get him on his back. She knew that it was a dangerous game that she was playing with him as his urges grew exponentially, but the thrill of dangers unknown excited her.

“Natalie… I need to... be inside you,” Vaun hissed darkly at her when she sat up. “I don't want to hurt you.”

She didn't reply, but straddled his hips quickly and took him inside of her in one swift motion that almost pushed the breath out of her lungs. Vaun's gravelly roar startled her a little, but she whimpered as she sank down onto his feverish girth, feeling it fill her again until she was flush with his groin.

Natalie leaned back, placing her hands behind her and on his thighs and moved her hips back and forth in the way that she knew would get her where she wanted to go, as it were. Vaun's hands clamped down on her hips, then fluttering frenetically to her behind, to her breasts, clawing down her belly to grab her hips again.

He dug into them hard and she groaned when he started to buck upwards, deeper and deeper, until she felt him against her cervix, each thud against it bringing her closer to rapture. With a few more grinding moves, she hit the spot inside of her that made her toes curl and her skin break out in goose bumps. A high noise ripped from her throat and her nails dug into his hard thighs as a dense nucleus of building heat in her loins burst open and radiated through her body with pyroclastic ripples of pleasure.

Natalie was still riding the aftermath of her climax and uttering little moans of aftershocks when Vaun lifted her off him. He jostled her onto her knees and against the pallet, slapping an unyielding palm between her shoulder blades. His hand pushed painfully against the healing cut from which he had extracted a worm from her. He forced her upper body face down on the pallet, exposing her fully to him.

Kneeling behind her, he wrenched her legs open with his thighs and guided himself inside of her. All she could do when he roughly sank into her again was to utter a trembling wail at how good it felt, even when spikes of pain shot through her when he started to fuck her hard.

* * *

Natalie's body clutched him tightly as Vaun worked himself inside of her. Her flesh felt even better than the first time, so sleek and so taut, yet yielding as she received him. He had felt new wetness inside of her when she had climaxed around his fingers and later astride him. The scent of her arousal had reached heights that made his head swim.

He stopped thrusting for a moment and brought his fingers up to face, inhaling deeply, and the scent of her on his skin prompted him to taste the digits. She tasted so alive, so female, and so willing. And now he was buried inside of her once again, this strange, polluted female that he was loath to let go.

“Vaun…”

Natalie’s keening moans brought his attention back to her.

“Don't stop,” she gasped from underneath him, and he obeyed.

His fist shot out and he yanked her head back by her dark hair, his other hand landing around the ball of her shoulder. He used the unyielding grip on her as leverage to pull her into the cradle of his hips, over and over again, accompanied by the sound of his own grunts and her piercing “ah” sounds, until he could no longer hold back his thundering release.

Natalie screamed brokenly when he hilted deeply, pulling her up by her dark hair and into his body where he came to clutch her tightly against him. His moment of crisis washed over him and he felt every muscle in his body go rigid. With a deep, raspy bellow he filled her sleek flesh with his inutile seed, and with it, all of his strength drained away temporarily. His grip on her slackened, and her upper body thudded down onto the pallet once more as she panted for breath.

He looked down where they joined, and slowly disengaged his languished cock from her. He was pleased to see that while the swollen flesh between her legs was reddened, especially in contrast to her pale skin, there was no blood this time. He knew that his attentions were rough on her, but the predatory instinct within him, hailing from both _strigoi_ and human, was powerful and his inexperience, he knew, had not allowed him to learn how to control it. He placed a hand on her shoulder, squeezing it softly now when his urges were sated.

“Natalie,” he growled. “Are you alright?”

“Uh-huh,” came her muffled reply from where her face had landed on the pallet.

She straightened scrupulously, and took his hand when he offered it to help her stand. She was flushed a beautiful pink color, her green eyes glazed and tired-looking.

“Was it… too much?”

“No,” she said, pulling her pants on again, wobbling a bit when she balanced on one leg to clothe the other. “Haven't had anyone be quite that rough with me. But I like it.”

She grunted and swore when she realized that the pants she had just pulled on were already soaked with the result of their coupling.

“You do?” He asked with not a little disbelief.

“Vaun,” she replied and finally shrugged at the state of her pants. “I _do_ like it. Please understand… you make me feel like I'm still alive.”

“You _are_ still alive.”

“Yeah, but for how much longer?”

Before he could reply, she took his hand and tugged on it.

“Enough about that shit. I don't want to spend any more time thinking about it. I need a shower. How about you?”

* * *

Once they had showered and dressed, Vaun stopped her before she could pull open the doors to the storage chambers. Natalie’s belly grumbled at her about canned food and bagged sour candies, but she paused and looked down at his white fingers where they grasped her upper arm, her gaze then traveling to his face. His features were severely lit by the small amount of light that filtered through the windows at the upper part of the doors, and his eyes bespoke of his intentions.

“You're kidding me. Again? What the hell, are oysters your snack of choice or something?”

“No,” he replied, ignoring her jest, but he added: “Please.”

She hesitated for a moment. Since she had climaxed a couple of times only a little time earlier, she wasn't quite as sore. However, she had started to feel a bit weary while they showered, and there was a raw sensation building at the back of her throat, as if she was getting a cold. She assumed it to be yet another cycle of _Plasmodium_ , wondering whenever the hell the critters that infested her blood would be done with it. But with those thoughts, she remembered her promise to herself and she nodded.

_Any pleasure I can get, before I can't get anything anymore._

“Okay,” she breathed, “But let's take it easier this time, yeah?”

He nodded once, the jerk of his head making the severe shadows on his features shift. His hands went to his trousers at her consent, freeing the strangely white, hairless flesh. She was unsurprised now to see him hard again.

 _Stamina like a fucking race horse._  
  
Natalie shrugged out of the shorts she had dressed in. She allowed him to lift her up against the doors and hook her legs around his hips. One of his hands gripped the back of one of her thighs to hold her up, the other one snaking itself upward to cradle the base of her skull.

She threw her arms around his neck to steady herself for his rutting. She sighed softly when he crouched to align himself with her and slid inside, and surprisingly, he lacked the almost manic urgency that he had displayed the other times.

Instead, Vaun buried his face at the crook of her neck, his hot exhalations of air that she still wasn't sure that he actually needed smoldering around the shell of her ear. She could already tell that she wouldn't physically be able to have another orgasm, but the slower rhythm enabled her to truly feel the smooth heat of his cock, the way the glans parted her passage and the thicker middle part of it that followed in its wake.

He kept up the soft pace, purring low in his chest rather than snarling and growling. He lifted his face, bringing the Glasgow smile of his mouth closer to cover her lips with it. His kiss was still clumsy and uncertain, but she welcomed his tongue into her mouth anyway, sucking softly on it. She felt his stinger rattle a little at the back of his throat as their kiss deepened, but she did not pull away.

Vaun increased the speed of his hips after a couple of minutes, and broke the contact of their mouths. Natalie felt his shark-like teeth around the ball of her shoulder then, and she tensed in anticipation of the pain. Yet the bite as he came was somehow gentle too, and she didn't know how it was possible as his teeth slid into the flesh there, his bite one with almost a type of peculiar surgical quality to it.

After his pleasure was done, he drew back to look at her with his strange dichromatic eyes that were hardly strange at all anymore.

“Are you well?” he asked.

“Yeah. A bit sore again. It's been awhile since I had any type of, hm… male attention.”

Vaun hummed, finally looking pretty sated.

I don't know, though,” Natalie said as he disentangled from her and set her down. ”I feel like I might be entering another cycle. Where the hell did I toss my shorts…”

With her fingers, she wiped as much of Vaun's fluids as she could from her inner thighs before finding the discarded shorts and shrugging into them. She had left her shirt on during the act.

“Another cycle,” she said once more. “Again. It feels a bit weird this time though, there's some kind of buzzing sound in my head, my sinuses feel strange, and...”

“Natalie,” Vaun called, but she didn't register it at first.

“... my throat feels sore, like I'm getting a cold… “

“Natalie,” he repeated, louder this time to gain her attention.

There was a broken, somehow crackling edge to his voice that she was not used to.

“Sorry, what?” she replied, turning to him.

His face was white as usual, but his features had hardened in a way that she hadn't seen before. His eyes, shiny marbles of crimson and coal, were full of something that she could only interpret as dread, which she hadn't seen in him before, either.

But when she noticed that he was holding his hand out in front of him, her eyes went there instead. At first, she didn't understand at all what it was that he was holding. It was dark, a bunch of it, strands…

Her entire body went cold as her fear exploded like an arctic cataclysm inside of her, sending sharp, icy shards of terror ripping through her limbs. Her spine felt like it twisted around itself with panic. She brought her fingers to the back of her head in disbelief, and confirmed her horrified suspicions when she felt a terrible smoothness where he had clutched the hair at the nape of her neck.

Because tangled in Vaun's white, slender fingers was a large, dark brown hank of her own hair.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hopefully you enjoyed this chapter, despite its ominous feel. As always, you'd be doing me a huge favor if you spot and report any errors or utter malarkey to me, since I have no betas. 
> 
> Huge thank you to majinkura for spotting a typo! <3
> 
>  **On Trypanosoma spp.:** This is a nasty little protozoan critter that's transmitted by the bites of certain insects, causing diseases named sleeping sickness or Chaga's disease, depending on the species ( _T. brucei_ and _T. cruzi_ ,) and on part of the world you're in. Natalie's explanation of its camouflage is correct, if somewhat simplified (don't wanna write a scientific journal here. I've written them, and read them, and they are drier than beef jerky made out of mummies). However, her explanation of the fantastic, yet frightening abilities of _Trypanosoma_ were drawn from a book named Parasite Rex, by Carl Zimmer; a fantastic read if you're so inclined. It's very enjoyable and also caters to the normal people who don't have a life-consuming obsession with parasites. =)


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Big thanks to majinkura for agreeing to beta-read this chapter for me. <3

Vaun stood in front of the incinerator, listening at the deep roaring of flames from within the great, dark machine in which he had burned countless bodies of both human and _strigoi_ , and beings in between. Little reflections of the fire escaped the tiny window set in the hatch of the incinerator, creating a feeble ruddy glow in a room blackened by the remnants of excess smoke and soot that the old ventilation system had failed to exhale into the world above.

The heat of the room eclipsed even his own body temperature, but he stayed in the same spot anyway. It was the same spot where he had stood on the day he had carefully carried Natalie's lifeless body there to be consumed by the fire.

He had stayed there nearly the entire day, the smell of her burning flesh acrid in his nostrils as her body was rendered into nothing but sterile, gray ashes. Afterwards, he had to feed to chase away the feeling of fatigue and emptiness that assailed him.

The red, rich blood of the captive that he had selected for himself tasted almost rancid as his stinger pierced the human’s jugular. And when the human was an empty shell and the pink, healthy sheen of his skin had turned dead and gray, Vaun still felt no better. His physical hunger had dissipated, but the fatigue and void within him remained.

In the end, Natalie had to die. Just like so many others.

After the initial signs of her metamorphosis, the process had quickened. Her voice had begun to change, carrying the raspy, gurgling undertone of a growing stinger as she sobbed, desolate, in his arms for some time.

The worst part had been the human instinct to flee danger when he told her, as softly as he could, that it was time. She shrank from him and ran, and he had been forced to hunt her down before she even reached the shower rooms. And he had dragged her back while she pleaded and screamed and begged for him not to do this.

She bargained, cursed, and fought, just like the humans that he fed upon. Little wisps of her dark hair dislodged from her scalp as they struggled with each step, the strands drifting down onto the concrete floor to show her final path. Small white patches of her bare scalp stood in stark contrast to the dark hair that still remained.

And the pain inside of him had been black and bitter and singular, shredding him with scummy barbed claws as she squirmed and cried in his hard grip like a pale eel.

The other blood parasite had lost the battle for her body. Vaun could smell it wasting away, its crippled components dissolving in the intricate lacework of her veins; yielding before the onslaught of the bloodworms. The worms were rapidly growing in strength and number as they finally supplanted the rival that had shared their host.

But ultimately, Natalie was the one who had lost.

And Vaun felt like he had lost, too.

She could not live. He had known in from the start, and so had she.

Her will to survive had been strong, but it hadn't mattered in the end. He had hated himself and what he was so profoundly and with such unhinged darkness when he forced himself to level a loaded gun to her head.

The memory of the aged prostitutes that he had killed when he lost control floated across his consciousness. He mourned them still, and he knew that he would mourn her even more.

A recollection of Neil made itself known next. His eyes and nose and ears had bled when the bullet smashed into his skull; the blood dark red and torrential and an utter horror.

But that, at least, Natalie had spared him from. She had pleaded with him to let her do it herself, to end her life on her own terms. With his shoulders slumping, and his head sinking between them, he had nodded silently.

She asked him to sit on her pallet. As he did so, she went to the storage cabinets where she had stashed all of the little bits and bobs that she had looted and brought from her home. When she reclined on her pallet, there was a small vial of clear liquid and a wrapped syringe in her pale hands.

He recognized the vial immediately. The label read “Morphine sulfate”, with a stern warning that the substance within may be habit-forming. He recalled that she had taken it from a looted drugstore after they had visited her nearly abandoned university.

And later that night, she had kissed him with anger, fear, and confused arousal.

Vaun swallowed and closed his eyes for a moment as he heard her tear the wrapping off of the syringe, the sound transforming from a crinkling noise to a crack of thunder in their shared little vacuum of disease and death.

When he opened his eyes again, Natalie was drawing liquid from the little vial with badly trembling fingers. He watched as she filled the syringe with the liquid until its tick-marked barrel was not able to hold anymore. Tying a ribbon of cloth around her upper arm, she then slapped the crook of her elbow until he saw a vein swell there like a little blue cord underneath the skin.

Her scent was rapidly becoming more and more saturated with corruption. The smell of the blood pulsing underneath her skin was no longer as human as it had been. Instead, it smelled more of the white ichor of the _strigoi_ , as if the equilibrium of human and creature had already tipped in the favor of the pollution.

She hesitated, staring at the needle in her hands. When she spoke, her voice was a fractured whisper.

“You never think that it will actually happen to you. I knew that I was dying of one thing or the other, but now… I really have to die. Or become.”

“I know, Natalie.”

“I thought that I'd be all brave when it came down to it, brave and fucking stoic… and I'm not.”

She chuckled, but the sound was completely hollow and devoid of amusement.

“I can hear his voice growing stronger in my head. And I want to follow. So… so very badly.”

“I know.”

“I am so fucking scared.”

The fragile humanity that she always tried to suppress was in full bloom, her features and mien like that of a frightened little child. And underneath it, when all things would be stripped away, waited a mindless fell creature that would be a mockery of everything that she had once been. A perverse insult to her humanity.

”I don't wanna die, fuck, I don't wanna…”

Her voice was tight now and ascending in pitch as her panic reared its head again.

“Natalie…”

She started to weep again; her wails beginning to take on a hysterical quality, accentuated by the reverberating whine of the immature proboscis that was developing in her chest. She started to violently squirm against him once more, bucking and thrashing. The needle slipped out of her hand and clattered to the floor.

“Let me go. Vaun, you _have to_ let me go, I don't want to do this… _Goddamnit,_ let me go!”

She managed to tear herself from him and get up, intent on trying to flee once more, her common logic forgotten and overtaken with that all too human wish for salvation; for _deus ex machina._ Vaun had seen it countless times in humans. But they both knew that she could not get away.

Not from the compound, nor from what was happening to her.

When he leapt after her and caught her wrist, she spun around and backhanded him, her pale face an ugly rictus of fear and anger. Her scabbed lips peeled back from her teeth as she snarled at him and few more tufts of her dark hair dislodged from her scalp, drifting down to pool around her bare feet.

When her strike did nothing to make him relinquish her, she hit him again, kicked him, and hammered at his chest with her free hand, a wordless, contorted scream escaping her throat. He could only grunt when her strikes connected and maintain his grip on her other wrist.

“Please, Natalie…”

“Get off me. Fucking _get off_ me!”

He hissed when one of her hits connected once more, to his side this time.

“Vaun, how can you do this to me,” she sobbed brokenly. “Vaun, please… I want to stay… w-with you…”

Her words were knives piercing him; both lovely and terrible. He did not know if they were true, or if they were intended as a bargain. He hoped that perhaps they were true, but ultimately, it did not matter. It was not allowed to matter.

“Natalie!” he barked, louder than he had meant to, twisting her wrist in his grip and pulling her to him until they were face to face.

She stilled dubiously, her breath a staccato of rapid exhalations.

“Tell me something about parasites,” he said then, and the unexpected request made her grow still, most likely due to surprise.

“... What?”

“Tell me about them. Tell me their names,” he entreated.

Tears and snot were running down her face, and he used his free hand to gently clean her up with the cuff of his black sweater. The sclera of her eyes were severely reddened, and he knew that it was not only from her tears. The color clashed horribly with the gray-green of her irises.

Her features were slack with confusion, but before her panic could surge again, he put his other hand on the small of her back, and lead her to the pallet where she slept.

“Vaun, I don't understand…?”

“Just tell me,” he insisted, seating them both down on it and cradling her back to his chest and belly.

She resisted only a little before leaning into him, hiccuping and fighting to level her errant breathing.

_“Balamuthia mandrillaris… Entamoeba histolytica… Toxoplasma gondii...”_

He could see her brow from where she rested her head on his chest. The severe creases that had lined it started to smooth out.

“Good,” Vaun murmured. “Tell me more.”

_“… Giardia lamblia… Schistosoma mansoni…”_

Natalie continued mumbling the names of her parasites until he felt her relaxing against him. Her murmuring trailed off then, and she simply sat there in his arms for a little while, silent and pensive, her hand seeking his and her fingers threading through his when she found them.

“Thank you,” she said quietly.

Her calm had returned; her logic restored. He could still discern her fear clearly, but she was fighting to control it.

After drawing a deep, quaking breath, she dislodged from him slowly and retrieved the syringe from where it had fallen on the gray concrete floor. She took her place on her pallet and leaned into his body once more, positioning the needle at the blue vein on her arm. The beveled steel slid through the thin skin effortlessly to pierce the vein waiting beneath.

“It shouldn't take long,” she whispered.

He wanted to slap the syringe out of her hands.

And he knew that he couldn't.

“Vaun… I don't want to be alone.”

“You're not. I'm here.”

“Just hold me, please,” she said. “Hold me.”

It was all he could do to just nod and put an arm around her soft belly and the other under her armpit and around her chest, otherwise leaving her arms unencumbered so that she could do what needed to be done.

Natalie leaned her head back against his shoulder and her thinning dark hair smelled of soap and death and their rutting. He felt her breath hitch warmly against his neck as she pushed the plunger of the syringe down, allowing all of the clear, lethal substance to flood her circulatory system. He could smell its medicinal bitterness as it rapidly followed the oscillations of her blood.

There was a couple of spasms from her and a strange gurgling noise that ended in a heavy, shuddering exhalation. He felt the pulse of her infected blood slow, only to stop altogether. The minute movements and workings of her organs tapered off. He could, at least, be pleased about the growing, invasive stinger in her chest doing the same. He knew that she was gone when he felt her body go completely limp in his grasp.

Vaun held her slack body for some time.

When he looked down at Natalie, it was clear that whatever had made her who she had been did no longer inhabit her carrion. Her eyes were unseeing glassy marbles, the color of dying leaves and the color of blood. Her skin had turned nearly as white as his own and her lips were a dead shade of violet. He closed her eyes gingerly.

Foam, tinted pink, flecked her lips and he wiped it away with careful fingers. Her scent had nearly dissipated, replaced by the odor of cold death and the very initial stages of decay.

At least the _strigoi_ hadn't taken her. He had been able to feel the Master crawling into her head as the blood worms knotted themselves into a nest deep within her brain, transforming her mind into nothing but the Master’s conduit. But the invasion had been abruptly interrupted. At least _he_ hadn't been able to have her. She had snatched herself out of his grasp, and in that, Vaun was able to find some comfort to try to soothe emotions that he didn't even truly comprehend.

And now, all he could do was to just stand there, staring at the incinerator that was her final resting place. His body felt truly old and decrepit for the first time in his long un-life, and it was a very cumbersome human sensation. His mind felt like it was fissuring somehow, little insidious cracks appearing where his sanity could leak out. But, perhaps infuriatingly, it did not break.

He had wished for it to do so quite a few times since her life was forfeit.

He stood there for another hour or so until he heard the call of the Ancients. They had not felt anything at Natalie's death, nor would they ever. They were not able to comprehend it. They were able to understand her humanity and grant her need for joy in her last days, but paradoxically, they could not grasp his emotional reaction to her death.

They could be pleased when he himself rejected the influence of his inner _strigoi,_ but could not empathize losing someone, as they had never done so. These human concepts of loss and grief fluttered just beyond their sphere of understanding, and they had long since deemed such sensations to be of little use to them. They were an enigma and very nearly a parody of their own antiquated selves.

The only thing he had gleaned from them on the matter of Natalie’s death was a slight sensation of disappointment due to her dual infections not producing any useful results for their war effort.

He could say that in that moment, he had hated them more than he thought was possible. He did nothing to hide the emotion from them and the Old Ones sensed it, but responded with nothing but neutral silence.

Now they were calling for him to start training their newest Sun Hunter, the man that they had tried to locate for some time. They had learned of a meeting between the young man and a man called Creem, the leader of a city gang and a notorious procurer, as it were. The Ancients had dispatched Vaun and some of his hunters to acquire the Sun Hunter, and it had been in the nick of time. The young man had been under heavy strigoi assault when they located him, dogging flailing stingers and the gangrel creatures that they belonged to amid industrial shipping containers by the docks of the city.

Augustin Elizalde, though he insisted upon being called Gus. Vaun had brought him in barely a day after Natalie's body had burned. The man had, perhaps understandably, been rather averse to the whole situation in the beginning, attempting to escape a couple times and attempting to fight him a few other instances. Finally, the stubborn youngling had understood that Vaun's intentions had not been to feed on him. Ultimately, Gus had realized and accepted what he had been chosen for.

Revenge was a stellar motivator.

After the whole initial debacle of their introduction, Vaun had showed him to the storage chambers where he was to stay.

Where Natalie had stayed.

Vaun turned from the scorching heat of the incinerator to make his way to the storage chambers. Sometimes, he thought that he could smell the last time he and Natalie joined in the corridors before she was gone. Other times, he thought that he imagined it as he stared impotently at the gray concrete walls that offered no response when he wondered to himself if he had, in fact, lost his mind.

When he arrived the chambers, he found Gus picking through the storage cabinets with great interest. A few magazines and a can of peaches in syrup were in his hands.

Vaun had burned all of Natalies belongings with her. He could not bear to have them in the chambers. The clothes hanging in the shower room had met the same fate; even though she had washed them, he had still been able to detect a few molecules of her scent on them. So he had burned all of the clothes she had ever worn, as well as the blankets they had coupled upon and she had slept in. He would have to procure some more bedding for his new Sun Hunter.

But there was one thing he had not parted with, and now he saw Gus crouching, relinquishing his magazines and canned fruit to pull the old shoe box out of its place on a bottom shelf. A little wrinkle of curiosity appeared between the man’s dark eyes as he turned the the worn box in his hands for a few moments. He then lifted the scuff-marked lid to take a look inside, his curious expression rendering him younger-looking.

Natalie's microscope slides were arranged within, in conscientious alphabetical order with each individual slide marked with her neat hand to identify the tiny microscopic organism arrested on the glass. Gus flipped through the little glass slivers as though they were records, each one clinking softly as it connected with its brother. Vaun allowed a low growl of displeasure to gurgle from his throat, but Gus either did not hear it, ignored it, or was simply unable to interpret it.

“What do you have all this science stuff here for, man?” He asked. “Nage...lira fowler… enta… amoeba… histo…”

Several furrows appeared on Gus’s brow as he tried to decipher the scientific names of the specimens. Vaun knew himself that the names of the organisms could be quite a mouthful for those who were not familiar with them, full of rather ridiculous arcane language, sometimes mixed with Latinized versions of the names of their discoverers.

The discoverer of _Schistosoma mansoni_ was named Manson. _Trypanosoma brucei_ had a discoverer named Bruce.

Natalie had chattered them off seamlessly every time.

“I can't pronounce this shit,” Gus exclaimed with a chuckle. “What is this?”

Vaun felt an irrational anger rise at seeing someone handle the microscope slides that had been Natalie's collection of parasites. They were _hers._

“Please, put that down,” he hissed, agitated.

The young man did actually start to put the box down, disinterested, until something on the inside of the lid caught his attention. There was something written there that Vaun hadn't been aware of.

It was her name.

“Natalie Hendricks,” Gus read out loud. “Last name sounds like that badass guitar player that Mr. Allen down the hall used to listen to… Hendrix. With an ‘X’.”

Gus chuckled then, his eyes revealing the recall of events from a former life. The soft light in the chambers made his brown skin glow golden.

“Man, Mr. Allen smoked a lot of weed… like, _crazy_ amounts…”

“Gus,” Vaun interrupted, but the man just turned to him with a little cocksure grin.

“You got some scientist _chica_ working for you, _ese_? Is this her stuff?”

“No,” Vaun snarled. “Put it back in the cabinet.”

The man appeared not to realize how much his actions grated on his nerves.

“What, she your girlfriend or something?”

Vaun did sense that there was no actual malice in his questions, just a type of baffled curiosity.

But he still felt his rage grow beyond dangerous levels as his fingers started to twitch and his stinger curled and coiled in his chest in response to the building tension in his body. He felt it starting to slither upwards through his gullet, but a hard push underneath his jaw with his fingertips rendered it limp again and he was able to swallow the thing like so much bitter bile.

Gus gave him a strange look at first as he pushed on his hyoid bone to slacken his stinger. However, something must have changed in Vaun’s face or eyes, or perhaps his posture, because he saw Gus’s dark eyes grow wide, his grin broadening.

But at least there was no mockery in his manner. Vaun wasn't sure he could have withstood any longer had there been.

“Shit, she _is_ your girlfriend! Where is she? I gotta meet this freaky mama.”

“She's dead,” Vaun snapped bluntly. “Now please… put it back. Now.”

Vaun watched the white sliver of the man's smile fade and close. To his credit, Gus gingerly lined all the slides back to their leaning positions and replaced the lid. He crouched in front of the cabinet and slid the shoe box carefully into its place again on the bottom shelf.

“Hey… I didn't know,” Gus muttered, visibly uncomfortable. “I'm sorry, man.”

“So am I,” Vaun growled, swallowing hard before continuing. “But she’s dead. Nothing will change that.”

He straightened a little then, forcing his unjust rage down into the cage of his chest where he hoped it would rot his stinger, but knew that it wouldn't. Parasites, after all, were sometimes impossible to get rid of without destroying the host, as well.

“What… what happened to her?” Gus asked hesitantly.

“She… she was…”

Her face flitted by in his mind then, her pink mouth quirking into a crooked grin and her gray-green eyes full of humor, full of intelligence; full of fear and grief. Her hand on his leg and the warmth of it, cooler than his own but different. The sailor-like invective that she sometimes spewed alternated with her yammering about parasites. The little scars on her skin that danced when she moved. Her body under his. Her body accepting his. Her accepting him, and all that he was.

“She was infected. She ended her own life.”

“Man, that sucks,” Gus said in a low, hoarse voice. “My brother… Crispin was infected too. He’s gone now. _Mi madre_ … My mom… She's sick, too. She's one of them now. But I can't… I have to find a way to help her.”

Vaun pinned him with a scrutinizing look.

“You will have to let her go. She is not who she once was.”

“I know she's in there, man! I _know_ it! I gotta help her!”

“She's _not_ ,” Vaun reiterated, “And one day you will learn this to your sorrow. Trust me.”

Before the young man’s anger and grief could build into what would likely be a very human emotional explosion that Vaun could not bear to witness at the moment, he decided to change the subject.

“But _we_ are not dead, Mr. Elizalde. And we have some work to do now.”

He saw Gus’s bunched shoulders relax a bit and the angry tautness of his face slacken. He seemed relieved to concentrate his attentions on something else than the life that he once had and the people in it. The tension between them dissipated.

“Training, yeah?”

“Yes. When you are ready, we've got a mission.”

“What is it?”

“I will tell you when you are ready.”

Vaun snatched a gun out of a holster on his belt with a well-practiced motion, handing it to the man.

“I assume you know how to use this,” he told him.

“Hell, yes,” Gus responded, palming the clip that Vaun gave him next and sliding it into the butt of the gun with familiar movements that proved his statement.

The Ancients had commanded Vaun to train the man, and when they deemed him ready, they were to be dispatched on a mission that could prove to be a major, if not debilitating thorn in the Master’s side should they prove successful. It was well-known to them that a human lackey, Eldritch Palmer, was the Master’s main source of currency in a world where advancement and industry was nearly impossible unless you had vast amounts of it. If they could acquire Palmer, the Master's seemingly infinite flow of money would likely dry up.

Apparently, the Master kept dangling the promise of immortality as his right hand in the feeble old man's face, and like the predictable, desperate and sickly human he was, Palmer had fallen for the bait, hook, line and sinker. It would not surprise Vaun in the least should the master eventually renege on his promise.

The Master was, and had always been, a self-serving deceiver.

In that moment, Vaun felt a tentative sensation of joy knowing that Natalie had not become one of the Master’s meat puppets. He had to admire her refusal to relinquish what she was, to relinquish her singular humanity and precious free will. She had been afraid and she had tried to avoid her fate, but ultimately, she had mocked the Master with what he ultimately despised: her own human autonomy.

Vaun faced Gus once more, who was turning the gun in his hands, lifting it to peer at the front and back sight; but with the safety secured, as was proper. His deep brown eyes met Vaun’s red-and-black gaze.

“When do we start?” Gus asked.

Vaun breathed deeply, savoring the tiny specks of Natalie's scent that still floated in the storage chambers like the snowflakes that he knew drifted above ground. He suspected that her scent would always invoke pain inside of him as long as it remained, but with it also came the memories that he hoped would eventually soothe him rather than damage him.

“Well, Mr. Elizalde,” he replied, “Are you ready for some revenge?”

“Shit, yes.”

“Excellent."

Vaun breathed Natalie’s scent once more, pausing for a moment to walk over to the cabinet where her old shoe box sat in its place. Gus waited, his eyes averted as Vaun opened the storage compartment and arranged the box just so, neatly flush with the side of the cabinet.

Straightening, he turned to Gus. The man looked up at him with a mixture of apprehension and sympathy, and Vaun ignored it, having no need for either. He made a sweeping motion toward the shadowed corridors beyond the storage chambers.

“Your path to revenge starts now,” he told the young man. “Follow me.”

Vaun took the lead, walking down through a maze of corridors toward an empty atrium that would serve well as training grounds. Gus followed close behind, the sound of his gait so different from Natalie's often barefooted padding.

 _And so begins my own path,_ Vaun thought.

The dying cries of humans sounded in the distance as the Ancients had awakened and started to feed on their waiting blood meal. And the _strigoi_ within him remained silent.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Don't hate me too much. The ending was one thing that I already knew when I started writing this. And just coupled with the fact that I don't do happy endings, as it were (I know, I'm evil as all fuck).
> 
> In any case, I hope you've enjoyed this little tale, and I thank you all so very much for all of your support. It is so appreciated, you have no idea. I did not expect that so many people would like this story when I started writing it, so your kind comments, kudos, and bookmarks have really made me a very happy FleshDust. Until next time. <3


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